


Growing Up Made Me Numb

by scarlettshazam



Category: South Park
Genre: Abuse of Dashes, Alternate Universe, Angry Sex, Angst and Humor, Anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, Bipolar Tweek, Bottom Tweek Tweak, Cars, Classic Cars, Depressed Craig, Depression, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mental Illness, Millennial Craig, Millennial Tweek, Nasty boys in love, Nihilism, Pierced Craig, Returning Home, Self-Discovery, Self-Esteem Issues, Shameless Smut, Smut, Switch Craig, Switch Tweek, Tattooed Tweek, Tattoos, Top Craig, Top Tweek Tweak, Unresolved Romantic Tension, coming home, falling in love a second time, millenials
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-05-30 00:05:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15084689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarlettshazam/pseuds/scarlettshazam
Summary: Craig Tucker never left South Park. He carved a spot for himself in the place he was born, and never wanted to leave what made him most comfortable.When his famous ex-boyfriend blazes into town, all Craig's convenient plans come crashing down.A story about falling in love -- twice.





	1. Help Me Feel Something Again

**Author's Note:**

> **THIS IS REPOSTED** 
> 
> This was originally posted on thepinupchemist/scarlettshazam, but has been moved here.

**Chapter Track: Sober Up (ft. Rivers Cuomo) – AJR**

**Chapter One**

_**Help Me Feel Something Again** _

Craig stared, disbelieving, at his father. Thomas Tucker was a towering barrel of a man, whose stature and fiery hair lent him presence. Craig inherited very little from his father – only his height and his blue eyes reflected the Tucker line. Otherwise, Craig faded into the background like a motel room painting, and was more than happy to keep it that way.

Still, this was a shock to the system.

“What?” Craig managed. (Dumbfounded – though his voice fell flat. Few people could read him.)

His father folded his arms across his broad chest and widened his stance as though gearing up for a fight. He repeated, “You’re fired.”

“I’m your son,” Craig intoned.

Thomas exhaled a long, tired sigh. He said, “Craig, I’ve allowed this to go on for far too long. If you were any other employee, you would have lost your position years ago.”

“So you’re firing me,” Craig said, “Because I…‘lack enthusiasm’?”

“Yes,” his father said, firm, “The position is simply suited to somebody more – extroverted.”

“Extroverted,” echoed Craig, “but I’ve worked here for _ten years_.”

Craig bled for this stupid goddamn gas station. He woke up at five in the morning for shifts, sacrificed his beloved hat in the name of the dress code, wore an apron day in and day out, suffered minimum wage and mopped the sticky floors for ten actual years.

“You have, and I think it’s time for a change.”

“A change?” A knot of anger clogged Craig’s throat, but he couldn’t swallow it away. “This is what I’m good at.” His voice dipped low and dangerous, but his dad didn’t appear fazed.

“You’re not that good at it, kiddo.”

“I’m – don’t ‘kiddo’ me, you jackass,” Craig snapped, “I’m not fired – I quit. You can take your job and shove it up your ass.” With that, Craig ripped the gas station apron off his torso and threw it in Thomas Tucker’s face. At the swinging glass door, Craig brandished a middle finger and held it behind him all the way outside and across the gas station lot.

His mother was going to kill him for missing weekly family dinner.

Whatever. His dad fired him from his own joint. Thomas owned the fucking place – he could’ve kept Craig employed even if he’d been getting nailed in the back room.

Not that he had a lot of opportunity for that, but still – the place belonged to his father.

In 2007, Craig’s dad purchased the gas station. Craig was sixteen. The gas station was the only one in town, and the only place for fuel for dozens of miles in every direction. Craig’s dad put him to work behind the counter at seventeen, because, as his father put it, he “needed some responsibility.”

Craig never left because – well, what was the point? He wasn’t good at anything, was average in every regard. Clyde could play football and Jimmy had comedy and Token excelled at goddamn everything because he was smarter than anyone should be. Craig had been an average student and never attended college. Everyone else had a thing, but not Craig. Never Craig. He liked cigarettes and cars and long ago, as a teenager, he liked his boyfriend.

But Tweek was gone. He left small-town Colorado and made it big. He had a website (That Kyle Broflovski designed, Christ) where Tweek sold books of his web comic _Crazy Boy Cartoons_ , and merchandise printed with his art.

Craig owned all three volumes of _Crazy Boy Cartoons._ The creased spines were a testament to how many times he’d read them cover to cover, time and time again.

He didn’t like thinking about what that might mean.

As Craig trudged along Main Street, his thunderous mood melted to a dull throb of frustration. None of this mattered, he comforted himself. The universe didn’t care that his own father fired him. The universe was impartial to his suffering. The universe didn’t give half a shit.

He passed Tweak’s on his walk to and from work – today, Richard Tweak stood behind the counter with bags under his eyes, customer flow stagnant and expression bored. Craig almost felt bad for him, except he knew exactly how much of an asshole Richard was behind closed doors, and recalling the staggering douchebaggery he associated with the guy dried up any empathy Craig might have experienced.

Craig shook his head and shoved his hands into the pockets of his torn-up jeans.

What was he going to do about rent? He didn’t pay much, but Craig couldn’t save for shit and blew all his extra cash on cigarettes and car parts.

“Fuck,” Craig muttered under his breath.

He was, God help him, going to have to brave a conversation with his landlords.

Christ, he hated thinking of them like that – even if it was true.

For better or worse, Craig rented out the renovated basement apartment beneath a house that belonged to three of the most annoying people in South Park – Kenny McCormick, Butters Stotch, and Bebe Stevens – and that didn’t even count their shrieking bastard spawn. Somehow, all three of those dipshits had their lives more together than Craig did.

McCormick opened up South Park’s first and only tattoo parlor at the tender age of twenty-one and shocked everyone by being actually good at what he did. Bebe ran the shop’s finances and hawked jewelry on Etsy fashioned from animal bones she picked up on local hikes. Butters stayed home with the spawn – an unruly blond toddler named Booker (Craig pinned that unfortunate moniker on either Butters or Bebe). Booker’s hair existed in a constant state of bedhead and his only volume was MAXIMUM.

On top of stay-at-home daddery, Butters was a sought-out interior designer. Before Craig moved into the basement apartment, it looked like the cover of a trendy catalogue.

All three of them were terrible. Worst of all, when Craig told them about being fired, they would probably _understand_.

Craig was right, of course. Instead of slogging down to his apartment, he knocked on the front door of the house. It was a gold rush-era structure, small and Victorian looking. The second that the door opened, Booker battle-cried, “UNCLE CRAIG!” and slammed into him with all the force his three-year-old body could muster.

Butters smiled his stupid gooey smile and welcomed Craig inside their stupid quirky home, offering coffee or tea or “chocolate milk, if that’s your deal.”

Craig probably wasn’t the only grown man that liked chocolate milk as a comfort beverage, right?

And so Craig swirled his chocolate milk around in his glass and confessed the loss of his cashier gig at his dad’s gas station to Butters while the throuple’s child ran pantsless through the house. Butters gasped in all the appropriate places in the story and patted Craig’s hand consolingly, fussing far too much.

“Don’t you worry about rent,” Butters assured him, “We don’t need the money.”

Logically, Craig knew they took his rent money out of pity, but hearing as much out loud stung nonetheless. He was supposed to be a fucking adult, but here he was in the same town he’d been born in, fired from his job at the gas station by his own father, living in a converted basement that belonged to people he went to high school with and didn’t even like all that much.

Craig put his face in his hands, which Butters took as a sign that he needed comforting. He rubbed Craig’s back and cooed appreciatively at the irritable grunt this elicited.

Ugh. Gross.

It occurred to Craig then that these people might actually be his friends. Jimmy texted him memes from time to time and Token checked up on him like it was a chore. Clyde never texted or called any of them anymore – he left South Park with a football scholarship in hand and played now for the Kansas City Chiefs. He was dating a cheerleader last time Craig worked up the nerve to Google him.

None of the friends he used to have lived nearby.

His friends now were – Craig shuddered – Kenny and Bebe and _Butters_ , for fuck’s sake. When had that happened? He couldn’t put his finger on when the shift occurred.

To Craig’s ever-increasing horror, long after he extracted himself from Butters’ embrace and retreated to his apartment to sulk, Kenny showed up on the doorstep of the basement with a six pack of cheap beer and a bag of weed. Even worse – Craig was happy to see him.

“Heard about what happened,” Kenny said, and lifted his offerings, “Wanna get fucked up? We don’t even have to talk.”

Exasperated, Craig agreed. “I hate that I like you,” he said.

Kenny grinned, all teeth, and said, “Yeah? Feeling’s mutual, asshole.”

Craig withheld a sigh. He knew if he slammed the door in Kenny’s face that he’d fucking knock again until Craig gave up and played beer therapy with him.

“Fine,” he bit out, and Kenny’s grin grew.

They slouched together in the cheap plastic lawn furniture Craig bought for a handful of change from the Marsh’s yard sale three summers before. Craig cracked open a beer, while Kenny rolled a joint with impressive speed between his tattooed fingers. His titanium wedding ring glinted on his hand and – how did Craig even know the ring was titanium? He spent way too much time with these people.

Kenny lit the joint with a lighter he had, in all likelihood, purchased from Craig’s dad’s gas station. He exhaled a fragrant cloud before he passed it along to Craig, who breathed in gratefully. Smoke burned its way into his probably already-black lungs. For a long time, neither he nor Kenny spoke, only nursed their beers and sucked on the end of the joint.

When warmth suffused Craig from his ears to his toes, head pleasantly fuzzy, he dared to at last complain.

“I can’t believe my dad fired me,” Craig said.

Kenny choked on the joint. Weed smoke puffed out of his lungs in strangled little clouds, and he thumped his hand against his chest as he hacked and coughed. Kenny squeezed out, “Your dad did _what_?”

“He fired me,” Craig slowly answered. “You didn’t know? Then what the hell is all this about?”

“Your boyfriend,” Kenny said, incredulous.

Craig furrowed his brow. He replied, “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

Kenny rolled his eyes and stubbed out the smoking end of the joint in the novelty ashtray Craig should have cleaned out weeks ago. He lifted one cocky, pierced brow and said, “Your ex-boyfriend. The only ex you have. You know. The famous one?”

“He’s not – that famous,” protested Craig.

“Buddy, come on. Let’s be real. He’s an internet sweetheart. Bebe follows his Instagram.”

“Okay. Fuck. Fine. He’s famous. What about him?” asked Craig, pissed as hell at the way his heart beat faster at the mention of Tweek Tweak.

“Damn, I really thought you already knew.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense then, you fuckin’ piece of–”

“I don’t want to be the one to tell you,” Kenny said, sucking in his teeth. He broke their gaze to throw a half-smoked pack of cigarettes on the table between them, an offering.

Craig pushed the cigarettes back, and then stood to his full six-foot-two, pointing an accusing finger at Kenny’s face. “Well boo hoo. What the hell happened to Tweek?”

Kenny held his palms out in defense. His voice came out soft and plying, as though Craig were an angry animal to be tamed. “Whoa. Hey. It’s okay. It’s nothing bad. He’s just coming back to South Park for a little. Like a week. That’s barely any time at all.”

For the second time that day, Craig found himself wordless. He fumbled for something – anything – to say, but no matter how many times he opened his mouth, no sound came out. The fight drained out of him all at once, and he sunk back into the faded lawn chair. Mute, he knocked back what remained of his second beer.

“What’s – where’s he staying?” Craig finally asked.

Kenny shrugged. “Dunno. His folks, I guess.”

Well, fuck.

Craig probably made a face, but he didn’t share with Kenny that Tweek’s dad was a colossal piece of shit, or that Tweek staying with his folks could be actually dangerous. That wasn’t Kenny’s business. Truth be told – it wasn’t Craig’s business either. Not anymore.

Silence stretched between the two of them, pulled too taut to be comfortable.

The single word that Craig uttered dropped between them like a hot stone: “Why?”

“He’s doing some book signings and shit at Tweak’s. Seems like a publicity stunt. For the shop, I mean, not Tweek. He doesn’t need publicity.”

“No. He doesn’t,” Craig agreed. Everywhere he turned on the internet, he ran into a repost of _Crazy Boy Cartoons_. Apparently Tweek was full of #relatablecontent, or whatever.

Some unnamable feeling writhed in Craig’s gut and coiled there like a snake. All the times he wished he could talk to Tweek, or just see him again, crossed Craig’s mind. There were so many. Too many.

Which was dumb.

It was over.

The fiery relationship between Tweek and Craig had burned like kindling, quick and hot and out of control – they were seventeen at the time, and Craig’s memories of it all were a jumble of fights and sex and crazy dumbass stunts. What burned between them blazed, and then it burned out. _Ten years ago_ , when Tweek left South Park. They’d been over for a decade.

As much as some traitorous piece of Craig longed to see Tweek again, he knew that was unwise.

That part of his life was in the past. Better to keep Tweek there, where he belonged.


	2. Going Nowhere

**Chapter Track: Homecoming – Green Day**

**Chapter Two**

_**Going Nowhere** _

Perhaps Craig should have been looking for a job, but over the course of the week following his firing, Craig couldn’t work up a shit to give about a job hunt. His landlords (friends? Ugh) didn’t ask him about rent, and Craig didn’t bring it up.

Mostly, Craig lived in the plastic chairs outside his apartment, chain-smoking while he flipped through comic books and old issues of _Car Craft_ and _Classic Car_ he never could force himself to throw away. Or recycle, anyway – Butters insisted, to the point that he’d given Craig his own blue bin and went through the trouble of collecting it every two weeks himself.

What Craig did pointedly avoid were the paperback volumes of _Crazy Boy Cartoons_ where they taunted him from the plywood-and-cinderblock bookcase he’d thrown together. A sandwich board outside Tweek Bros advertised Tweek’s arrival in three days – February 12, 2018. Craig tried not to stare at the thing every time he wandered past it to buy more cigarettes.

**FEBRUARY 12 – 19**

**TWEEK TWEAK RETURNS HOME**

**BOOK SIGNING FROM 7-9 PM EVERY EVENING**

At the bottom, one of Tweek’s illustrations of himself waved from the advertisement. Craig doubted Richard paid the amount of money he should have in order to use Tweek’s art. What a fuckface.

Three days, unfortunately, passed far faster than Craig cared for. Despite existing during those three days, Craig couldn’t speak to what the hell he did during them. He smoked a lot and sulked a lot and generally allowed life to happen to him without bothering to fight it.

On the Monday that Tweek arrived in town, Craig’s awareness of his location shifted from “floating around with vague baseline awareness of his existence” to “my ex-boyfriend could be anywhere so I’d better watch my fucking step”.

The safest option was to stick to his apartment and never leave at all, Craig decided. He locked the front door and smoked with the storm window open. When Butters came to check on him, he snapped at him to fuck off. From the dismal contents of his fridge, he knew he would need to leave before Tweek’s South Park visit came to a close.

Maybe, if he stretched his Hungry Man microwave meals to every other night –

No. Craig would do a hell of a lot to avoid a confrontation with Tweek, but he wouldn’t starve himself to avoid one.

But then, he wondered, what would he do if his unluckiness threw him into the path of Tweek Tweak. He wasn’t unattractive, exactly. Not that Craig looked great, either. As a teenager he’d been knobby, a beanpole after puberty truly gave him the what-for and forced his height up several inches in the space of a few months. His body filled out in the intervening years: shoulders wider, thighs thicker, stubble obstinate, a little more ass than he needed.

In high school, _coolness_ saturated every aspect of his life. Was it cool to cut his hair like Pete Wentz? Did his skinny jeans and hi-top converse project the pop punk vibe he wanted to cultivate?

Now, Craig couldn’t say if having an undercut was still cool, and he had no idea what vibe it projected, but he had one. He wore t-shirts from high school, though the cotton fabric felt tighter in the shoulder and across the gut. He had piercings, but only because McCormick needed a body to practice on and Craig was convenient.

As with most facets of Craig’s life, his appearance was entirely average.

Tweek Tweak was anything but average.

Craig scoffed at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He muttered, “You fucking idiot,” shook his head, and fished a pack of Marlboros that he’d already smoked too many of out of the pocket of his jeans. He crossed to the bedroom part of the small apartment, threw open the storm window, and heaved his body up to sit on the ledge that opened to the outside.

With a grunt, he lit his cigarette with a match, because all his lighters were out of fluid and he didn’t dare stray too far from home for fear of running into his ex.

From the back pocket of his jeans, his phone beeped. Almost no one texted him – he shouldn’t have been surprised to see not Token or Jimmy, but Kenny.

**[12:35 PM] some fuckin asshole:** _hey can u do me a favor_

Craig frowned. Kenny seldom asked him for anything. Come to think of it, the most that any of his landlords asked him to do was throw his beer cans in the recycling. He considered telling Kenny to eat a dick, but Kenny and his spouses had been…kind, lately.

**[12:37 PM] Craigular Guy:** _what._

**[12:37 PM] some fuckin asshole:** _i have a guy im tattooing n i need coffee like air pls help im dead inside_

Getting coffee meant leaving the apartment.

Getting coffee meant going to Tweak Bros, unless Craig threw together something in his $29.99 drip pot, which he knew was not the kind of coffee that Kenny was asking for.

If Tweek’s book signings took place at night, and assuming 27-year-old Tweek was anything like 17-year-old Tweek, then Tweek would be as far away as possible from Tweek Bros until his presence became necessary. Tweek Bros, therefore, was safe.

Craig stubbed the cigarette out in the gravel at the bottom of the storm window and answered:

**[12:40 PM] Craigular Guy:** _yeah fine gimme 30_

With a quick drag of a brush through his hair and a fresh t-shirt that reeked less like he’d been chain-smoking since eight am, Craig seemed himself fit for the general public. He shoved his gross boots onto his feet and his favorite hoodie over his shoulders, and dared to venture outside his apartment for the first time since Tweek arrived in town.

The walk down from the asymmetrical tangles of houses to the picturesque slope of Main Street took around fifteen minutes – more if Craig got distracted by playing Chinpokomon GO, which he did, as usual. He always stopped to catch cosmonewt on the sole basis that it was his favorite Chinpokomon, and they rarely spawned in South Park.

A bell tinkled as Craig shoved his way into Tweek Bros, relieved to see Ike Broflovski behind the counter instead of Richard Tweak. Craig didn’t know what the hell Kenny wanted, and rather than ask, he ordered a couple of caramel lattes. If McCormick had an issue, he could take a break and get his own damn coffee.

Mountain Summit Tattoo lay a handful of buildings down from Tweek Bros. It was, somehow, the nicest-looking business in South Park, decked in a blend of Kenny’s classical-style tattoo art and Colorado paraphernalia, including a miniature replica of the Denver Airport’s demon horse, glowing eyes and all.

“Hey fucker,” Craig said as he shoved into the shop, “I hope you like caramel, you –”

Craig stopped. He might have dropped the coffees, but that shit cost $3.75 a pop and he was a practical man, so he held strong.

There, reclining on Kenny’s chair with a tattoo needle buzzing against his ribs was Tweek Tweak.

Goddamnit, he looked good. His hair, just as untamed as Craig recalled, poked out from beneath an olive green beanie. Tattoos littered his bare chest, still as stringy as he was in the locked-away parts of Craig’s memory. Smoky eyeliner ringed around his green-hazel eyes – how was that fair? Craig thought the world of Tweek when they were teenage lovers, but this Tweek, this adult incarnation, looked better than any nightmare he could have conjured. His features still reminded Craig of a mischievous, otherworldly being, a trickster with a thin, long nose and eyes bouncing with mirth.

The buzzing of the tattoo needle paused.

“Bitch, what took you so long?” Kenny asked.

“Chinpokomon GO,” Craig answered, numb, “There was a cosmonewt.” He stumbled forward and offered the latte, unable to peel his eyes from Tweek’s form in the tattoo chair.

“What are you getting done?” Craig asked.

Tweek grinned, and his eyes crinkled at the corners.

“Blucifer,” he said, and sure enough, most of the Denver demon horse reared up on Tweek’s ribcage.

“Latte’s for him,” Kenny said, “I’m working.”

“You set me up,” said Craig.

“I told him to,” Tweek said, lifting the coffee from Craig’s grip and drinking in a long pull. “Kenny said you wouldn’t leave your apartment. Figured you should get out.”

“That was highhanded as fuck,” Craig remarked, tone mild.

The buzzing began again, and Kenny’s blue-gloved hands moved in short, precise movements. Tweek didn’t as much as wince, and held Craig’s gaze.

That was unnerving.

Craig looked away.

“I’m almost done,” Tweek went on, “We could hang out afterward.”

Craig’s brain, because it was a dillhole of the first degree, screeched to a halt and refused to create sentences. He wet his lips and then drank his caramel latte for the sole purpose of having something to do, buying some time before his idiot mouth sputtered, “Yeah, okay.”

Kenny made a judgmental humming noise. Craig pretended he didn’t hear it.

Continuing his theme of moronic behavior, Craig plopped down on the empty tattoo chair across from Tweek’s and waited.

Tweek wanted to hang out? Tweek wanted to hang out. Tweek wanted to hang out!

Of all the possible outcomes Craig played out in his head of running into Tweek, _hanging out_ never made it onto the agenda. He imagined Tweek as bored or unimpressed or even disdainful, but not…that. Craig felt a smile tease one side of his mouth. Of course Tweek surprised him. Tweek never did what anyone would expect.

Too soon, Kenny snapped off his blue gloves and wiped down the new ink on Tweek’s torso. He bandaged the tattoo with expert accuracy, slapped a care sheet onto the front counter when Tweek passed him a wad of cash, and said, “Use a condom, kids.”

Craig flipped the bird and Tweek let out a throaty laugh.

As they strode out of Mountain Summit Tattoo, Tweek started in, “You know, locking yourself up in your apartment – that sounds a lot like depression.”

Craig stared at him.

“I’m not depressed,” he said, though the words felt sticky in his mouth.

Who gave him the right to psychoanalyze him, anyway? They’d been boyfriends, once, a long time ago. A prehistoric relationship meant nothing. Whether Craig Googled Tweek or bought his art books or read his blog was all irrelevant.

“It’s kind of not your business,” Craig finally said, “Like, at all.”

“Fair enough,” shrugged Tweek. He cast his empty coffee cup into one of the outdoor trashcans along Main Street that Wendy Testaburger petitioned to have installed. He changed the subject to ask, “What are you up to these days, anyway?”

Craig stiffened. He replied, “My dad fired me a couple weeks ago. I guess I’ve been babysitting Kenny’s kid? Sometimes.”

“You don’t like kids,” Tweek said. He eyed Craig, for the first time looking anything less than glad to see him.

Craig gave a helpless wave of his hands. He agreed, “Yeah, but I can’t pay rent right now, so.”

They walked in silence for several minutes. Craig got rid of his cup in another one of Wendy’s trashcans, and found it in him to ask, “Are you…staying with your folks? Like, are you gonna be okay?”

The impish expression flew from Tweek’s face, replaced by something more sullen and far younger than the rest of him looked. He didn’t answer at first, shaking his head. When Tweek did speak, he said, “I don’t think that’s any of your business, either.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Craig said, and then, “What the fuck are we doing?”

“What do you mean?” asked Tweek.

“We’re not even friends anymore,” Craig said, “I think I’m friends with Butters.”

“Gross.”

“I know,” Craig said, “but it’s not like you and me are buddy-buddy.”

They tried. They didn’t break up when Tweek left to attend school in Boulder. They texted and chatted and Skyped, but when Tweek told Craig he wasn’t ever coming back to South Park…Craig swallowed the lump in his throat and scratched a hand through his hair. He didn’t like thinking about that conversation, about the hard, determined look on Tweek’s face that stared at him from Craig’s laptop screen, didn’t like recalling the sting of every word that fell from Tweek’s lips.

After a few awkward attempts at texting, they didn’t try anymore. Not after that.

Which is why Tweek’s next words shocked Craig into feeling like the sidewalk beneath his feet would open up and swallow him.

“I know we’re not really friends,” Tweek said, “but I think we’d still have great sex. Don’t you?”

“I’m…what?” Craig got out, barely. A shrill string of nervous laughter bubbled up from his throat, and he winced at the sound.

“Sex,” Tweek repeated.

“Like. In theory?”

“No, I mean, let’s go have sex. Right now.”

“Are you fucking with me?” asked Craig. What the hell was going on?

Tweek looked Craig dead in the eye, then made a show of sweeping his gaze down. He replied, “I mean, that’s the goal.”

Tweek had always been bolder than Craig figured out how to be, but this was some next level shit. He blinked at his ex, frozen in place, and tried to think of the appropriate thing to say. He’d had sex since Tweek; of course he had. But his drive for sex was nowhere near what Tweek had liked in high school, which was – all the fucking time.

“Um,” Craig said, stalling.

Tweek cocked a single (penciled-in?) brow and questioned, “No?”

“No,” Craig said.

“All right, your –”

“No, I mean, yes,” Craig stammered.

“Yes, let’s fuck, or no, fuck off, Tweek?” Tweek asked.

“Yes,” Craig decided, “Let’s, um, fuck.”

**

Tweek took Craig’s hand and guided him back to the knotted mess of houses that made up residential South Park: houses from every era in every color, mobile homes, empty summer houses that belonged to wealthy Denverites, and abandoned ruins of hundred-year-old structures with peeling paint and shattered windows.

The Tweaks lived in a mid-century mess of a building, but Tweek didn’t pull Craig toward the front door. Instead, he ushered Craig to the most god-awful puke-green hippie van that Craig had ever seen, parked at the bottom of the Tweaks’ expansive dirt driveway. Tweek unlocked the back of it and with a flourish said, “You still in?”

Without a word, Craig climbed into the back of the hippie van.

“This thing is ugly as sin,” Craig commented, when Tweek closed the back doors behind them.

“I know, right?” Tweek replied excitedly, “Isn’t it great? I always wanted one.”

Most of the back of Tweek’s hideous van was cushioned with hideous pillows and heinous blankets in eye-watering patterns. The left side of the van boasted a giant “I WANT TO BELIEVE” classic UFO poster plastered across it, while original sketches of Tweek’s own art papered the right. Craig tripped over an alien-shaped throw pillow in an effort to get a closer look.

“Now I make enough money that I’m pretty comfy, you know?” Tweek said, and without ceremony, stripped off his overlarge, striped sweater.

Tattoos dotted his skinny torso like stickers: different styles, different artists, different subjects – nothing cohesive drew Tweek’s tattoos together, though somehow, they all made sense. There were purple, pink, and blue roses on his arm, hyper-realistic gears over his heart, a MC Escher illusion on one shoulder blade, some cartoonish aliens on his side with large heads and tiny bodies.

Tweek didn’t allow much time for Craig to drink him in. He gripped the front of Craig’s t-shirt and yanked him forward into an aggressive kiss. Out of habit, maybe, Craig let his mouth part under Tweek’s, let their tongues brush and circle one another in their mouths. Tweek sunk his teeth into Craig’s bottom lip, and Craig let out a soft, surprised noise.

“Take off your clothes,” Tweek said, and pushed Craig back toward the world’s ugliest blanket nest.

“Okay,” Craig said, and shed his t-shirt and combat boots and holey jeans without an ounce of hesitation.

This was weird, and he knew it was weird, but he couldn’t find it in him to care. Enough shame remained to wonder if he should be self-conscious in his Chinpokomon boxer briefs, but only for the space of a startled inhale, because Tweek gripped Craig’s waist and guided him into another kiss, this one slow and filthy. Though Tweek was at least three inches shorter than Craig, he commanded the van like a giant. He slunk out of his skintight jeans and –

“You’re not wearing any underwear,” remarked Craig, mouth going dry.

“Pants too tight,” Tweek said, and flicked his bangs out of his eyes.

Naturally, Craig’s eyes drifted to where light-blond hair met the juncture of Tweek’s legs, where his cock looked small and vulnerable.

But it didn’t _stay_ that way. Tweek clasped his cock in one hand and pumped along the shaft with practiced rigor, and his erection grew huge in his hand.

“I forgot,” Craig mumbled.

“Forgot what?”

“How you have a surprise monster cock,” Craig said, “How the fuck. Did I sit on that. So much. In high school.”

“Practice?” suggested Tweek.

“Something like that.”

With the flat of his palm, Tweek shoved Craig back into the mass of ugly blankets. Craig landed with a soft _thump_ , but didn’t have time to shift before Tweek crawled over him on all fours, intent aflame in his wide-blown pupils. He pressed his long-fingered hands under the elastic legs of Craig’s boxer briefs and flung them to the side of the van, someplace near the UFO poster.

“Wow,” Craig said, and that’s about all his brain could muster. _Wow_.

The patchwork of bizarre tattoos continued down Tweek’s chicken legs, which had stayed gawky and stick-thin while Craig had thickened into a body that belonged to a grown-ass man.

“You are so hot,” Tweek told him, breath heavy.

“Me,” Craig deadpanned, “Okay.”

Tweek grinned. “You are. Hang on.” He plunged both hands into the jumble of pillows and blankets and, several seconds later, surfaced with a half-used bottle of lube.

“You just keep that in here,” Craig said.

Tweek made a face. “Yeah. I live in here. Right now, anyway.” A beat. “Jesus, you thought I was staying with my parents? I don’t hate myself that much. Christ, Craig.”

Craig opened his hands in an ‘I don’t know, man’ gesture.

With his teeth, Tweek cracked open the bottle of lube, and Craig awkwardly cleared his throat. He said, “Um, so. It’s been a while. Like, a few years. Since…that. So.”

“Don’t destroy you?” Tweek said.

Craig nodded, although he wasn’t sure that was right, either.

“Destroy me nicely,” he said, and spread his legs open. It didn’t make sense, and he didn’t care. None of this made even a modicum of sense. He leaned back to grab a throw pillow with orange fringe and propped his neck up. Tweek edged forward on his knees and dipped down to steal a dirty, instant-long kiss before he coated his fingers with lube.

Having a finger in his ass wasn’t entirely alien to Craig. He got fancy when he masturbated from time to time, but having another human finger you open was a different experience. From person to person it differed – Craig had been with some dudes that liked to draw it out with intense foreplay, but Tweek, as he always had been, gave him a perfunctory fingering to lube him up and left the trimmings out of it.

Craig hated remembered why he’d loved this man.

Tweek grasped his erection at the base and hefted Craig’s legs up higher. When he pressed in, hot and thick and wonderful, Craig said, “Kenny told us to use a condom.”

“Don’t talk about Kenny McCormick while I’m fucking you,” Tweek complained, and snapped his hips into Craig.

Craig’s strangled gasp rattled through the hippie van. He wrapped his legs around Tweek’s switch-thin frame. Tweek’s wiry muscles twitched under his skin, withholding the unlikely strength that Craig’s ass was remembering all at once. Tweek thrust up into him and Craig let his head loll into the bizarre pillow collection as a jolt of pleasure fizzled through his body.

Tweek planted his hands on either side of Craig’s head, bending Craig’s body almost in half, so that he could draw him up into another kiss.

Pinned to the blanket nest by Tweek’s limbs, Craig rode the waves of pleasure, pressure pushing at him from the inside out. When Tweek’s agile fingers closed around Craig’s thick erection, he moaned a little into the sweaty crook of Tweek’s neck.

Tweek jacked Craig’s cock with almost casual determination. The combined sensations of heavy fullness and slick constriction threatened to overwhelm Craig’s senses. He hadn’t had sex he liked this much since – well, for a long-ass time.

“Gonna come,” he said on the edge of a whisper, and ropes of white spilled out over Tweek’s hand, over his ampersand finger tattoo and cold, clacking rings.

The moment Craig came, Tweek manhandled him back into the pillows and doubled down on the pace, driving inside Craig with force that shook the hippie van around them, punching little noises out of Craig’s throat with each jolt of their bodies.

Tweek pulled out to come into the pillows, and swore.

“I liked this one,” he whined, dragging a come-covered mermaid pillow up from between them. He threw it toward the doors and rolled off of Craig, all the breath escaping his lungs at once.

Awkward silence blanketed them.

“So, that was fun,” Tweek said, “but I’m gonna nap before I have to the fucking signing at the shop tonight. You can crash with me, if you want.”

“That’s…I’m okay,” Craig said, “I have stuff to do.”

He did not have stuff to do.

“Cool. See you later.” Tweek offered a loose-limbed facsimile of a salute.

Bizarre energy skittered between them while Craig hunted for his clothing and redressed with stilted, clumsy movements. He couldn’t keep his eyes from wandering to Tweek, shameless and naked and stretched out on a pallet of the world’s most appalling pillow collection. He laced up his combat boots, patted the back pocket of his jeans for his phone and said, “Well. Bye.”

Tweek waved him out.

Brain muddled, Craig hopped down from Tweek’s van and slammed the door closed behind him.

“Oh, hello, Craig.”

Craig’s head shot up. Further up the driveway, Richard Tweak stood beside his own car, a briefcase in hand.

“Uh. Hi,” Craig said. His eyes darted to the hippie van in which Tweek was stretched out like contented cat.

The guilt was written all over his stupid face; of that Craig was sure. His ass throbbed with the evidence of what he and Richard's son had been up to mere minutes before.

“It’s good to see you again,” Richard offered.

Craig bit down the honest response – he did not feel the same – and turned to trudge off toward his apartment with a stiff wave at Richard Tweak.

The orgasm that minutes ago had him smiling like an idiot now stirred something uncomfortable in him. Why had he done that? He liked the sex. Of course he did. But how like Tweek to crash into Craig’s orderly life and dick everything into oblivion in a handful of hours. Craig spent ten years doing just fine. He didn’t need Tweek Tweak or the amazing sex that came with him.

Right? Right.

Damn it. Craig kicked a stray rock with the toe of his boot and watched it sail across the street toward the McCormick-Stevens-Stotch house. His ass would be sore for days, at this rate. He'd let Tweek ream him, and for what?

What the hell was he thinking? Tweek wrecked everything in Craig once already, and now Craig was primed to let it happen again. How much of a dumbass could he be?

And to hell with Tweek, frankly. He left Craig here and was more than happy to do it. Leave it to Tweek to want a rerun of Craig’s Greatest Misery Hits. Pissed off and post-sex hungry, Craig unlocked the door to his apartment. The first thing to greet him, of course, were the volumes of _Crazy Boy Cartoons_ in a neat row on the makeshift bookshelf in the tiny living room.

Fuck those stupid books. Fuck those stupid books and fuck Tweek.

Craig ripped all three volumes of _Crazy Boy Cartoons_ and tossed them into Butters’ recycling bin with the beer cans.


	3. Take Advantage of My Heart

**Chapter Track: Lonely Hearts Club – Marina & the Diamonds**

**Chapter Three**

_**Take Advantage of my Heart** _

How long had that water stain been on the ceiling above his bed? Craig wasn’t sure, but he narrowed his eyes and decided that whatever length of time it had been there, the stain looked like an oblong ear of corn. He frowned, let all the air out of his lungs, and stared across his slovenly apartment. Things had gotten out of hand in the past couple of days – Craig ordered in City Wok and closed off the world beyond delivery guys, questionable coffee from his cheap-ass coffee pot, and the scent of cigarette smoke so poignant it seemed to bleed from the walls.

Empty paper cartons littered the plastic card table and mismatched chairs he generously referred to as his dining set. Dishes came together in the sink to form a Jenga tower of shame, while curtains snapped over the storm windows that bracketed his apartment at either end blocked out any possibility of sunlight.

Tweek’s reappearance in Craig’s life hit him like the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, and discomfort crawled across Craig’s skin like the layer of iridium that coated Earth.

The more that Tweek lingered in Craig’s brain-space, the less he wanted to brave the outside world. Tweek always had burned bright – that he blazed his way back to South Park and set it aflame with the force of his personality shouldn’t have come as such a fucking shock. But Craig got cozy.

He thought he had friends, but while he withered away in South Park, they’d grown up and moved on.

He thought he had a job, but his father fired him.

(Craig’s mom wouldn’t stop texting him to come home for dinner, but Craig’s anger had yet to subside, and he told her as much. She promised him that was okay, but to come home soon. Meanwhile, that morning, Tricia texted Craig a picture of dog shit captioned “dis u???” to which he replied “Bitch it might be”)

Craig thought he had an ex-boyfriend, but they’d fucked in a hippie van two days ago, so what was the truth?

Tweek seemed – like he had it together. His notoriety came equipped with money, and Craig knew from reading Tweek’s blog he was medicated for bipolar disorder and anxiety. What Tweek failed to manage in high school he appeared now to have under lock and key, while Craig was wasting space and taking advantage of his sort-of-friends.

He needed a new job.

For a brief moment, Craig eyed the grease-stained City Wok containers and entertained the idea of applying to work there, like McCormick had all through high school. But then, he wondered, would he have to talk to people? He didn’t care for talking to people he didn’t know, and helping customers was stranger hell.

Whole Foods – he could do the nighttime stocking job that only required interacting with rich stoners in search of late-night munchies.

A crisp knock rapped against his door.

Craig stiffened in his bed, daring a glance at his door. There were few possibilities regarding his visitor’s identity: Butters, returning the recycling bin; Kenny, seeking a drinking buddy; or his mom, who’s tired of his bullshit and has come to Craig’s apartment to drag him to his childhood home by his ear. He slumped off of the bed and crossed the apartment with a grumble.

When Craig opened the door, Tweek Tweak blinked back at him, beanie on-head and hands shoved into the front pockets of his thick hoodie.

“What,” was all that Craig said, because _what_. What was he doing here? What was his problem? What the hell was he thinking?

“Hey,” Tweek said, and brought a hand out of his hoodie pocket to tug at his hair, a familiar nervous tic that suffused Craig with unexpected affection.

Liquid insides notwithstanding, Craig scowled. He asked, monotone, “What do you want.” He forced the threat of familiar devotion to the furthest reaches of his heart, down in a tidy box, where it belonged. There was no place for those feelings anymore, and there hadn’t been for a long time.

“Dunno,” shrugged Tweek, tucking an offending lock of hair behind his ear, “Wanted to see you, I guess.”

“You can’t do this,” Craig said, with unforeseen resolve, “You can’t jerk me around, hon – Tweek. It’s not cool.”

Tweek frowned, then, the light in his mischievous features draining. He said, “I-I’m not – that’s not. I’m not trying to.” He fidgeted with the edge of his hoodie, tugging down the hem.

Craig rubbed his temples, shoving dark hair away from his forehead, and rolled his lower lip between his teeth. He decided, “Come in.”

Like that, the twinkle in Tweek’s eye returned.

“It’s gross in here,” Craig warned him, and closed the front door behind them.

The filthiness of Craig’s apartment hadn’t embarrassed him five minutes ago, but a rush of mortification heated Craig’s face at having Tweek standing in his mess. The City Wok containers, so innocuous before, stood out like red pen on a report across his crappy table and kitchen counters. The dirt on the laminate floor had never been so obvious, and the nest that Craig had formed on his sagging mattress looked like the work of a madman.

“You…want coffee?” Craig offered.

Tweek’s lips quirked up in a half-smile. “Always,” he said.

Craig busied himself with preparing a fresh filter of grounds for his small coffeemaker and pointedly avoided looking at Tweek. He could feel Tweek’s eyes follow him as he went through the motions, and turned away to find Tweek drinking him in with a look on his face not unlike some he’d worn in high school.

Something vaguely feral, something hungry, filled Tweek’s elf-like features, heated his lined eyes. Instead of a responding heat, weariness swept over Craig at the sight.

So when Tweek asked, “You wanna mess around or something?” – Craig answered, “No, Tweek.”

Tweek pulled his lips together in something close to a pout. He asked, “Why not?”

“What do you mean, why not?” Craig asked, slanting a _Look_ his way, “I don’t want to. That’s it. We probably shouldn’t have done it before.”

In stilted silence, Craig let the coffee pot finish filling and took down the last clean drinking vessels from his cupboard – a novelty tankard and a Spider-Man mug – and filled each. He dosed his own with milk and sugar, and slid Tweek the tankard undoctored.

“Thanks,” Tweek murmured, and wrinkled his nose when he sipped. “That’s pretty bad.”

“Yeah, I know,” Craig said. They fell back to wordlessness, and Craig took the opportunity to stare his fill at this adult version of Tweek, one he’d seen on social media and Tweek’s blog, but never in person.

When they were in high school, Tweek wielded sex against his anxiety. On his blog, he said he’d used it to cope with mania, and hadn’t known until a psychiatrist correctly diagnosed him. Back then, when anything overwhelmed Tweek – homework, their friends, politics – he’d find Craig and they’d screw around in the junker car Craig’s parents helped him buy when he got his driver’s license.

Eventually, past the taste of canned coffee, Craig swallowed and dared to inquire, “You still, uh. Still use sex to help calm down?”

Tweek lifted his narrow shoulders and let them fall again, fingers tapping at the outside of the tankard of coffee. He responded, “Yeah. I mean…well, yeah. I do. Sort of more of purpose than I used to. Like mindfulness and shit. I’ll say to myself, ‘I’m manic, so I’m gonna go find someone to fuck.’ Feels better, somehow.”

“Right,” Craig said, not getting it all. “Do I want to know what you were thinking two days ago?”

A soft laugh escaped Tweek’s lips. He drained what remained in the tankard and said in reply, “I wondered what you’d b-been doing. How you’d been doing. Then I wondered if sex with you would be just as good as it was when we were teenagers.”

Craig thumbed the rim of the Spider-Man mug. “And?” he asked.

“Better,” Tweek concluded, “It was better.”

Craig lifted a single brow.

“It was!” Tweek said, “and maybe I wasn’t thinking through that. I try to, but – it’s like, I’m self-aware. I know my brain isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing, but it’s happening anyway. You don’t want me to be weird and I don’t want me to be weird either, but I do it anyway. I’m working on it.”

“I thought this wasn’t any of my business,” Craig couldn’t help but spit out.

“You let me in your apartment, and I’m drinking your shitty c-coffee,” reasoned Tweek, “I may as well throw you a bone. What were you doing before I waltzed in here? I saw my b-books out on your lawn chair.”

 _Damn it, Butters_ , Craig thought.

“I was…job searching,” Craig said, hoping that Tweek wouldn’t translate that and know that Craig actually meant ‘thinking of what jobs wouldn’t require human interaction’.

“Just b-be yourself,” Tweek assured him.

“I don’t want to be myself,” Craig said, “I suck.” He didn’t know he was going to say it until he did, but the look on Tweek’s face told Craig he should have swallowed the words back and kept that shit on lock.

Craig didn’t hate himself. Hatred required a level of investment in himself that simply didn’t exist. Craig, if pressed, would say that he was tired of being trapped in his body, in this stupid place, on this crappy planet.

Tweek’s cocked brow and pursed lips spoke louder than anything he could say, but he went on anyway, “That’s not normal, Craig.”

“Sure it is. Nobody likes themselves.”

“I like myself,” Tweek stated, firm. “I say the wrong thing and make shitty choices, but at the end of the day, I’m glad I’m me. I’m glad I’m not boring or vapid or mean. I’m a whole lot of messed up stuff, but I think it turned out to be good stuff. I’d just rather be me.”

“That’s…” Craig trailed off, “That’s great, but I think you’re unique in that, hon – Tweek.”

“No, I’m not,” Tweek insisted, “Kenny likes himself.”

“Kenny’s a piece of shit.” Who was kind of Craig’s friend, but that was neither here nor there.

“Butters, too.”

“Butters is weird,” Craig said.

“Craig!” burst Tweek, “I don’t know you anymore, okay, but I know mental illness. Look at this!” – he swept a hand at the apartment at large – “You’re so depressed you don’t know what to do with yourself.”

“I’m not depressed,” Craig told him, “I’m not sad. I’m not crying on my mattress because we had sex. I just don’t care. And you know what? I’m still not your business. You can’t invite yourself into my house and then take a shit on it.”

A beat passed before Craig realized the bubbling, acidic sensation in his gut was _anger_. More anger. The past two weeks had spurred more outrage than Craig experienced in the two years before that. He flexed his fingers out and pressed them back into fists several times before he decided, “Leave. Okay? Just leave. I can’t do this. I can’t keep doing this.”

Tweek stood up. He placed his tankard atop the Jenga tower of shame where it swayed in Craig’s kitchen sink, and said, “A-All right. It was good to see you, Craig. Take care of yourself.”

Craig bristled. “Fuck off, Tweek,” he said.

“Fucking off,” Tweek replied, hands in the air.

Craig tried not to slam the door behind the dickhead as he walked away, but he failed, and the door shivered in its frame at the force of his throw. He collapsed back into one of the ugly dining chairs (fucking honey oak) and hung his head in his hands.

Fucking Tweek.

Tweek was like nicotine.

Craig felt better, felt soothed, by nicotine.

But he didn’t breathe like he used to – not after smoking for ten years of his life.

Much like nicotine, Tweek felt great in the short-term. Orgasms. Compliments. Hair-petting.

But in the long-term? Tweek shortened his breath and constricted his lungs. Craig couldn’t breathe with Tweek here in town, and he couldn’t wait for him to leave. Once Tweek left, everything would return to the same, comfortable routine that Craig had grown accustomed to. His lungs would open up again.

The mail slot on Craig’s front door creaked, and a squarish, purple envelope fluttered to the ground. Craig smoothed his unruly bangs back from his face and collected it, returning to his seat beside the kitchen table. Inside, an invitation to a private _Crazy Boy Cartoons_ book signing party read as so:

**PRIVATE BOOK SIGNING WITH TWEEK TWEAK**

**COCKTAILS WILL BE SERVED**

**FORMAL ATTIRE REQUIRED**

**FEBRUARY 17, 2018**

**9:30 PM to MIDNIGHT**

**TWEEK BROS COFFEE**

Swoops of ink covered the embossed letters of the invitation – Tweek had drawn illustrations from his comics by hand. At the bottom of the cardstock in tight, neat lettering, he’d written “ _Please don’t make me do this shit alone_ ” with an arrow pointed toward the fancy inscription.

Craig let his head fall against the card table with a rattling _smack._

God damn it, Tweek.

Like nicotine, Craig craved Tweek like nothing else.


	4. This City's Gonna Kill Me

**Chapter Track: Everyone I Know – K. Flay**

**Chapter Four**

_**This City’s Gonna Kill Me** _

The day before the fated Tweek Bros exclusive cocktail party dawned mundane and cold, though not cold enough to justify Craig staying cocooned in bed in the covers toasty from a night in his body heat. He crafted a begrudging pot of coffee, unable to dissociate the aroma freshly ground beans from Tweek fucking Tweak and his stupid impish smile.

He shouldn’t have cared that as he prepared his cup Butters appeared on his doorstep in all his earnest glory, from his fresh face to his button-down shirt, but the sight grated Craig. Butters, being himself, ignored all signs of annoyance and swept into Craig’s apartment with his hands planted on his hips, as though wound up for an argument.

Craig didn’t like the look of it.

“ _You_ are moping,” Butters accused. His tone left no room for debate.

“I am not,” said Craig, debating.

“You are,” replied Butters, “and I’m here to pull you out of it, Mister.”

Craig’s mouth turned down. Unfortunately, due to the Recycling Bin Debacle of 2016, he knew exactly how immovable Butters could be when struck by a particular idea. His fortitude, upon his escape from his parents the instant he turned eighteen, outmatched that of anyone else Craig knew. (Except, perhaps, Tweek, but he kicked that thought in the ass and crammed it down away from the light of day)

Despite topping out at in high school at 5’7”, the straightness of Butters’ spine and determination etched in his face lent him the illusion of being bigger than he was in reality. Craig shouldn’t have been cowed by a man in suede loafers, but the idea of a full-blown fight over social interaction lodged bile in Craig’s throat.

“What the fuck,” Craig settled upon saying.

“Don’t you ‘what the fuck’ me,” Butters scolded. His eyes shifted to the clutch of empty takeout boxes, and he wrinkled his nose. When Butters returned his attention to Craig once again, he scanned Craig like an art critic, and Craig stuffed his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants so he didn’t fidget and clue Butters in to how irritable he was.

“You need a meal in you,” decided Butters.

Oh, fuck that.

“No.”

“Yes,” Butters bickered.

“Uh-uh.”

“Yes. You’re coming up to the house tonight. We’re having porkchops and baked potatoes. You’re gonna eat with us, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

The mention of a meal that wasn’t beef lo mein or wonton soup inspired a meaty gurgle from Craig’s stomach.

Damn it.

Smug, Butters said, “That’s what I thought.”

This was how Craig wound up in the home atop his apartment, sticking his hand in a houseplant because he couldn’t tell if it was a fake or not. The softness of the leaves suggested real. Of course they kept their plants alive.

As Craig’s apartment once had, the McCormick-Stevens-Stotch house emulated the inside spread of a home decorating magazine, but for the spread of toys scattered across the living room carpet, mainly a mix of plastic dinosaurs and Barbies missing their outfits. Rustic wall art dotted the space at tasteful intervals, and a blue chenille throw draped over the arm of one of their chocolate-brown sofas.

Craig sidestepped a small Lego minefield and followed Kenny’s retreating back to the dining room.

For as close as they lived, Craig rarely witnessed Kenny in the comfort of his own home. He avoided as much, because he didn’t need new friends, and he didn’t want to get too close. Outside, at work, Kenny tamed his hair or threw on a backwards ballcap like a wannabe frat bro, but here, his scratched his hand through his not-short-not-long hair and ruffled it into several directions. His bare, bony feet stuck out from the frayed legs of his jeans.

“Can’t believe Hubs bullied you into dinner,” Kenny remarked, “You want a beer?”

“I can’t believe you just called Butters ‘Hubs’,” Craig threw back. He picked up a knick-knacky Superman mantle clock for a decorative end table and turned it over in his hand.

Kenny simpered, “I won’t apologize for my happiness.”

“God, you’re gross,” Craig told him, and then added, “Yeah, I’ll take a beer.”

Kenny retreated to the kitchen and returned with two cans of beer In hand. He lobbed one at Craig, who caught it with a snap of his free hand – old reflexes from high school baseball never quite disappeared – and replaced the Superman clock on the table. He popped open the can with a crisp fizz of CO2\. He knocked back a sip only to sputter at the bitter taste in the back of his throat.

“You dick,” Craig said. He hated IPAs, which McCormick fucking knew, the dildo.

Predictably, Kenny laughed.

“The look on your face – ha! Don’t worry, I’ve got your boring beer, too,” he said, and ducked back to the kitchen to trade the opened IPA for a blond.

“You sure do love your blonds,” teased Kenny, “Me, your beer, your boyfriend.”

“He’s not,” Craig stated, “my boyfriend.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” shrugged Kenny, and then called behind him, “Babe, how long have the porkchops got?”

“Ten minutes,” Butters’ voice drifted into the room sing-song, alongside the scent of cooking meat and onions. Like a punch to the gut, the aroma reminded Craig of his parents’ house, of the family dinners that he told his mom he wasn’t interested in going to because he was still too pissed about being fired to look his dad in the eye. He should probably text her, though, he thought, with a wry twist of his lips.

“Where’s Bebe,” asked Craig. Of the three, Bebe was the sanest – in Craig’s opinion.

“Wrestling our demon spawn into clothes so he’s not naked at the dinner table while we have a guest.”

“I’m not a guest,” Craig said, “No need to dress up on my account.”

“You’ve never been over for dinner before,” Kenny pointed out.

Craig didn’t know what to say to that, so he drank his beer and avoided looking Kenny in the eye.

“I know you don’t like to think of us as friends,” Kenny went on.

Like magic, Craig felt like an asshole. These people – whether or not their cliques annoyed the hell out of each other in high school – had given him nothing but the benefit of the doubt while his life collapsed in on itself like a deflated basketball.

But an apology soured on Craig’s tongue. Instead, he said, “You’re not…the worst.”

“From you, man? That’s high praise.”

To Craig’s relief, Bebe emerged from upstairs with Booker sniffling on her hip, sparing Craig from any further awkward conversation about the status of his and Kenny McCormick’s maybe-friendship. And to further the not-talking, Craig busied himself with setting the table.

Then, he sat down to break bread with his weirdo landlords.

Kenny regaled them with Karen’s tales of college, which Craig had never had the occasion to hear. He knew, in a vague place in the boxes at the back of his brain, that she went to CSU in Fort Collins, but hadn’t absorbed anything beyond that. Now, she lived in Denver like Tweek, and worked a desk job at a dentist’s office.

Privately, Craig envied Kenny for having his sister so close. Tricia bolted for New York as soon as South Park High School cut her loose, and returned only for short holiday visits. She worked about ten million day jobs, but dreamt of acting as a full time gig. For the time being, her reality was choruses and non-speaking roles, but she claimed she didn’t mind.

Like the sappy moron he was, Craig missed her, same way he missed Jimmy and Token and even Clyde. None of them lived in the state of Colorado, although when Jimmy happened to have a Denver show during his comedy tours, Craig never missed a show. They’d find a dive afterward and drink and reminisce, and Craig walked away wearing the feeling of left-behind like a familiar coat.

Craig didn’t begrudge his friends their happiness, though it did loom over him, in those dusty brain-boxes where all the thoughts he didn’t want to think moldered in his subconscious. They hadn’t forgotten him – he’d been a groomsman at Token’s wedding in St. Louis last winter – but they moved onto adulthood and Craig was…doing what he always did. Existing, letting life play out with minimal interference on his part.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Bebe asked.

Craig startled and blinked back into himself. The rest of the table (Save Booker, who was squishing baked potato and cheese together in his fists and – rubbing it on his face? Okay) gazed back. The level of eyebrow-lifting suggested Craig checked out for longer than he thought.

“There’s this thing tomorrow night,” he said.

Why did he say that? Shit.

“Oh?” Bebe pressed, one manicured brow arching ever-higher toward the her mane of blond curls.

“It’s bullshit, they’re totally taking advantage of him,” Craig went on, and God _why_ was he still talking, “but Tweek invited me so I gotta go. His folks have got him doing some bullshit special formal party at the shop. They’re just taking advantage of him, but whatever; he knows that.”

Butters pressed a hand over his heart.

“What.” Craig narrowed his eyes at him. “Why are you looking at me like that.”

“You’re a hot mess,” Butters exploded.

“What’s wrong with this,” Craig asked, gesturing to his Sonic Youth t-shirt, blue flannel, and jeans. These ones didn’t even have holes in the knees.

“You look like Kurt Cobain’s sadder cousin,” Bebe said.

“I don’t think that’s an insult,” Craig replied.

Kenny commented, “Now there’s a fuckin’ surprise,” and drank deep from his beer can.

Bebe tapped manicured, glittery fingernails against the dining table and asked, “What are you going to wear?”

Craig hesitated. He could shut up and flee, but that seemed a little dramatic. He’d barfed out too much information already, and he couldn’t back out. He inhaled through his nostrils and confessed, “Like, a button-up shirt?”

Butters put his face in his hands and Bebe’s brow quivered.

“You can borrow Kenny’s suit,” decided Butters, “He’s skinnier, so it’ll be a little bit of a tight fit, but we don’t have many options.”

“We need to cut your hair,” Bebe announced.

“What’s wrong with my hair,” Craig asked, and self-consciously rumpled his hair with one hand.

Bebe looked disappointed for a moment. She said, “It’s like…you wanted an undercut, but didn’t know what it was? It’s too long.”

Kenny reached over to pat Craig’s shoulder. “Butters’ll fix it.”

**

The clean-shaven triangle of Craig’s head itched a little, the cold night air too sharp against the exposed part of his scalp. Kenny’s stupid suit dug into the meat of his armpits, but Bebe and Butters ultimately were right: Craig looked better than he had in a long-ass time, probably since fucking prom night, since he’d worn his regular clothes under his robes for his high school graduation. Butters buzzed a crisp equilateral on the left side of Craig’s head, and the rest of his dark hair flopped to the right. The dark suit cut a flattering silhouette, far from the slouched, bored shadow he cast on an average day.

Despite Craig’s upscale attire, Richard still glowered at his invitation.

“I didn’t realize Tweek would be inviting you,” Richard remarked.

Craig schooled his face to neutral and said, “I didn’t either, Rich,” and patted his arm. He didn’t allow Richard enough time to stop him, and slid seamlessly into the crowd of what appeared to be everyone’s fucking parents, and maybe a rando or two from Denver. Crowds didn’t key Craig up the way that they did Tweek – or, at least, the way they used to bother Tweek.

Tweek lasted between fifteen and twenty minutes in the high school gymnasium on prom night, and when he lost his shit and bolted himself inside a bathroom stall, he’d only calmed down after Craig blew him. In the bathroom. On the floor.

Kyle Broflovski had walked in while they were at it in the stall and threatened to alert one of the prom chaperones, though he didn’t follow through. In fact, Craig had kicked open the stall while Tweek was still futzing with the fly of his dress pants, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and told Broflovski he dared him to do it.

The fucking audacity he’d had as a teenager – where the hell did that all go, anyway?

“Craaaig!”

And there stood Tweek, in an honest-to-god forest green suit, looking dapper as all hell and fundamentally hipster in a way that Craig had been and always would be too uncool to achieve. In his hand he held a mug, but a film of disconnectedness was hazy in his eyes.

“Coffee?” Craig asked.

“Just enough that this doesn’t smell like too much like whiskey,” Tweek said, swaying in place.

Craig steadied Tweek with a hand to his forearm and grimaced at the tremors wracking the arms beneath the fashion-forward suit. This, Craig remembered. Countless days of spun-out Tweek messed up on the drug of the day (prescribed to him by a doctor or traded from Kenny for wadded up tips, it didn’t matter) prepared him for Tweek’s tumble forward and the spill of coffee-whiskey across the front of Kenny’s (thankfully) black suit jacket.

“Shit,” slurred Tweek, “I ruined your thing.”

“It’s McCormick’s,” Craig said, “Don’t worry about it.”

Craig craned his neck at the loose knots of people netted across the exposed concrete floor of Tweek Bros Coffee. Not one glanced their way, likely more worried about being seen at an event perceived to be Exclusive and Important. No one would notice, except maybe Richard, if Craig smuggled Tweek out the back door for some fresh air.

“Come on,” he said to Tweek, and pried the mug of whiskey-coffee out of Tweek’s white-knuckled grip. He left it on a buffet table and hooked an arm around Tweek’s waist. He steered them behind the dark front counter and to the back room, whose metal door to the dumpsters was a relief.

“I missed you, you know?” Tweek told him.

“You’re drunk,” Craig reminded him.

“Yeah,” Tweek agreed. He peered out into the middle-distance, more young-looking and vulnerable than Craig had seen him since his return to South Park. Quietly, Tweek said, “I did, though. Miss you.”

Craig bobbed his head for lack of words. Being needed by Tweek struck an odd, old chord in his chest. In high school, Tweek’s parents exhausted and aggravated him with the hours that they demanded. Between schoolwork and work-work, Tweek Tweak of 2007 had been a trembling, pill-popping wreck of a human being who dipped his hands in paint and clawed at canvases. He liked clear instructions from Craig, because he could always please Craig. They were young and dumb now, but back then they’d been younger and dumber by a mile.

“We should go for a walk,” Craig hedged, and watched closely for Tweek’s reaction.

Tweek nodded, silent.

Arm locked ‘round Tweek’s waist, Craig drew them out of the garbage-filled alley outside Tweek Bros and to the sidewalk. A bubble of emptiness surrounded the town. There were no people, no cars – just flickering orange street lamps and the bone-deep promise of snow from the ironclad clouds that quilted across the night sky.

For all the growing that South Park did throughout Craig’s childhood and teenage years, they remained small and insignificant, nestled in mountain valley that one major road threaded through. At times, South Park gave the impression of liminal space. Like an airport, no one came to stay: they dropped by to fill their gas tanks or resupply road trip snacks, or to visit the people that lived here already. Craig couldn’t remember the last time that somebody moved into town. They came and they went, leaving ghost impressions of themselves in graffitied bathroom stalls and Instagram pictures.

Tweek leaned his head against Craig’s shoulder. Had Craig been by himself as he had on the walk over, he might have taken out his phone to check Chinpokomon GO and count his kilometers, but unsurprisingly, Tweek took precedence. Tucked against his side, Tweek’s chest heaved with a weary breath.

“Seemed like you had it together,” Craig said.

Tweek squinted up at him with watery hazel-green eyes. “Most of the time,” he murmured, “I manage. They diagnosed me as Bipolar I.”

“I know,” Craig blurted, “I read your books.”

Tweek huffed a soft laugh. He responded, “Yeah, I know. I send my books out by hand.”

Embarrassment flushed hot and heady through Craig and lit his cheeks on fire. He grabbed at the back of his neck with his free hand.

Tweek leaned against Craig again and reassured him, “You don’t have to be embarrassed. I think it’s k-kinda sweet.”

“Right,” Craig said.

Tweek sighed. “Anyway…when I’m down in Denver, at home, my triggers are far away. Here? Everything is one gigantic reminder that I’m f-fucked up.”

“Why’d you come back?” asked Craig.

“Ugh,” Tweek groaned, “My mom asked.”

“That’s it?”

Tweek glared at Craig and punched his arm. He said, “You know what she’s like. I was like, ‘No, mom,’ and she was like ‘I miss you so much. I only have one child and he doesn’t even love me enough to _blah blah f-fuckin’ blah._ ’ I got guilted into it, and I hate it. I hate that I’m here. I’ll be minding my own business and suddenly I’ll remember being so high I thought the fucking devil was taking my body for a ride, or crying in that stupid shop at eleven at night because I couldn’t get the grinders to work right and it’s just – how do you do it?”

“How do I do what?”

“Live here, with all the memories?”

“I don’t think about them,” mumbled Craig.

“How?”

Craig shrugged a shoulder and gazed out at the faint silhouettes of the peaks around them, pitch black against a dreary sky. On clear nights, South Park suffered so little from light pollution that the universe looked touchable above their heads, the cosmos whirling in polka-dotted loops of light. Tonight, the thick layer of cloud-cover cut off the tide of stars, trapping all of South Park in a jar of eerie silence. Their footsteps echoed as their shoes struck the pavement, and the heat of Tweek’s body bled beneath Craig’s borrowed suit jacket.

“I fuckin’ hate it here,” Tweek said again.

“Then leave,” Craig said.

“What?” managed Tweek.

“Leave,” Craig repeated, “Everyone that wanted a book signed already got it, and we both know it. I’ll drive. I don’t have anywhere I need to be.”

I don’t have anywhere I’d rather be, Craig thought.

“Yeah,” Tweek said, reanimating from his slump and peeling their bodies apart. He smiled. “You’re right. Let’s get the hell out of here.” He reached down and laced his fingers through Craig’s hand, tugging him back toward the scattered houses that looped around the town. They ran in the freezing cold, in the still night, their laughter echoing up and down the streets.

At the Tweaks’, Tweek retrieved his key to his hippie van from the pocket of his green suit and passed it to Craig, who unlocked the doors.

They clambered in on either side of the van, still ugly even in the dim, dim light of the neighborhood. Still breathless from laughter, Craig pressed the key inside and turned, but nothing happened. The engine didn’t rumble to life, and the hippie van remained as still as the rest of the town.

“What the fuck?” Tweek squeezed out.

Craig tried turning the engine several times, but the van did not respond.

“Shit!” Tweek yelled, reaching up to tug at his haywire hair.

A reflex: Craig reached across the seats and gripped Tweek’s thin wrists, pulling his hands away from his scalp.

“Hey, whoa,” Craig said, “I know this is bad, but –”

“I can’t take it!” Tweek exclaimed, “I hate it here. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.”

“I know, honey,” whispered Craig. He released Tweek’s wrists, swallowed the temptation to diagnose the car himself – his car expertise was a hobby, and he wouldn’t be able to do as well as Bob at White Auto Repair would – and tucked a lock of hair behind one of Tweek’s ears.

“We’ll take it to White’s in the morning,” Craig told him, “Why don’t you get some rest?”

The anxiety wilted in Tweek’s expression, and he let out an shaking exhale.

“Okay,” he said.

They circled to the back of the van and Tweek scrambled into the back, refusing the help of Craig’s extended hand. Craig loitered, gawking, as Tweek yanked pillows and blankets into a shapeless, cozy mass. He kicked off his dress shoes and collapsed into his nest in one fluid movement, but instead of instructing Craig to close the doors, he crooked a finger at him, inviting him inside.

“Oh,” Craig said, “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, come on.”

Craig crawled inside and slammed the doors closed. Tentative, he wriggled up alongside Tweek and lay his head on adjacent pillow. Their faces only inches apart, Craig could smell the whiskey and coffee that lingered on Tweek’s breath.

Tweek, as per usual, initiated the kiss. This wasn’t a kiss with intent, but a long, lazy kiss. They tasted one another, foreheads pressed together, and Craig cradled Tweek’s face. Emotion soared inside him, but he kneaded it down into something manageable, pecking tiny kisses to Tweek’s spit-slick lips.

Kenny’s suit dug into Craig’s armpits, but Craig didn’t care. He didn’t dare breathe too loudly, for fear that whatever this was would crumble in his hands and blow away.

Tweek let his eyes flutter closed and ordered, “Stay.”

“Okay.”


	5. Mystical but Sensible

**Chapter Track: Something Like This – Ukiyo (ft. FEELDS)**

**Chapter Five**

_**Mystical but Sensible** _

Consciousness came in stages. The cramping in Craig’s underarms triggered a groan, which echoed into quiet space. The combined scent of patchouli incense and marijuana hung in the air like a stain. The aroma took Craig by the hand, and sleepily, he drifted to memories of finding Tweek meditating in his bedroom with ink-stained hands, exorcising the near-permanent smell of coffee from his clothes with cone incense and a prayer.

“I know you’re awake.”

Craig cracked open his eyes. Above him loomed alien regalia and the bold lines of Tweek’s artwork. Beside him, Tweek sat cross-legged in those green suit pants, but barefoot, his bowtie undone and draped over the back of his neck. A stream of fragrant, skunky smoke passed through his pink mouth.

Craig coughed and pushed his body to sitting.

“How long have you been awake?” he asked. Craig shed Kenny’s suit jacket and his entire body sagged with relief. That skinny fuck.

“Most of the night,” Tweek said.

“Sucks,” Craig mumbled.

“I hate Bob White,” Tweek complained, apropos of nothing, “I can’t believe he’s still the only game in town after all this time. You – you used to know so much about your car, back when we were kids. Can’t you fix her up?” He knocked against the shell of the van.

Craig shook his head. He replied, “Cars are just a hobby. Bob’s a dickhead, but at least he knows what he’s doing.”

Tweek narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips, giving the impression of a pissed-off, stoned Legolas, but he didn’t say anything.

“That was in high school,” Craig felt the need to defend, “We don’t know each other anymore.”

“Maybe,” Tweek waffled.

Tweek didn’t argue when Craig dialed the phone number for White Auto Repair, though his sour expression said everything that he didn’t. A look of disdain masked his face as Bob came to tow the van and transport them to the repair shop.

Craig disliked Bob White more than he disliked most people, and his baseline contempt was nigh infinite. Rather than stay to watch Bob get into the guts of Tweek’s hideous hippie van, he punched his newer phone number into Tweek’s phone and told him to text if he needed anything, because Craig was a moron that still cared about his ex-boyfriend from ten entire years ago.

Craig walked home with Kenny’s suit jacket slung over one shoulder and Chinpokomon GO pulled up on his phone. The boring ones – roidrat and gophermon – were the only Chinpokomon to spawn.

Craig’s neck prickled with embarrassment – a twenty-seven-year-old, unemployed, still-whipped-by-his-high-school-boyfriend man was the last man standing playing stupid Chinpokomon GO. This was his life. Token was working through his residency at a hospital in St. Louis and Jimmy was arguably more famous than Tweek. Clyde was more famous than all of them put together, and Craig was – _Craig,_ playing Chinpokomon GO on a Saturday morning like some turd.

Whatever. Who cared. He caught a lambtron and moved the fuck on.

Because the universe was a terrible, impartial thing and had no hand in cutting Craig some slack, Kenny was smoking outside the door to Craig’s apartment when he arrived home. He’d pulled the hood of his parka up, obscuring most of his face.

“Came to check on you,” Kenny said, flicking ash from the end of his cigarette, “and turns out you’ve been out all night slutting it up. I hope you didn’t get jizz on suit; Bebe will murder you.”

“Nothing happened,” Craig said. He collapsed on one of his chairs and ran his fingers through his hair. When Kenny drew a pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket, Craig accepted one and let Kenny light the end of it before he took a drag.

“You’re so full of shit,” Kenny said around a smoky grin.

“It was a kiss,” Craig said.

“ _It was only a kiss, it was only kiss_ ,” sang Kenny – Craig shoved him, hard.

“Anyway,” said Craig, “He’s getting out of here. He kinda broke down last night. Said this place is fucking him up, and he was drunk, so I didn’t want to like, take advantage of him.”

“What did you do, then?”

Craig studied Kenny. In high school, bags hung under his eyes same as Tweek, a combination of being overworked, underpaid, and a regular disaster. He was bright-eyed now, his hair less brittle and his frame less gaunt. Kenny’s buddies drove Craig up the fucking wall, but Kenny was an all right guy. He didn’t barf people’s business out to his friends, not the way that Marsh of Broflovski or Cartman gossiped back in the day.

“I offered to drive him back to Denver, since he was wasted,” Craig went on, “but his van’s busted, so we made out and slept in the back. Got it towed to White’s this morning.”

One sandy brow jerked up in response – an expression Kenny had learned from his spouses.

“You have cars,” Kenny said.

Craig shushed him. “That’s not important,” he said.

“Riiight,” Kenny replied, “That’s why you spend all your spare cash and time on them.”

“They’re just a hobby,” Craig insisted.

“And my tattoos are just doodles,” Kenny clapped back, “Hobby, my ass.”

“I’m not talking about this with you,” said Craig.

“That’s all you, dude, but I can’t believe you’re letting your boyfriend hang out to dry.”

Craig stubbed out his cigarette. Some had emptied his abused ashtray – probably Butters. He stood up, said, “He’s not my fucking boyfriend, Kenny,” and made to pull open his door, before he remembered it was locked.

He fumbled with his keys too long. Kenny straightened and had time to say, “You let him go way too easy, man.”

Craig slammed his door behind him.

How he chose his to live his life was none of Kenny’s business – he was Craig’s landlord. That was it. So they shared cigarettes and green and commiserated about the mundanity of their lives –

Aw, hell. They were friends. Craig Tucker and Kenny McCormick were friends, and Craig had been a punk.

Craig hung his head and sighed. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers into the lids.

He was, tragically, going to have to apologize.

Kenny hadn’t moved from the lawn chairs when Craig braved a return. He didn’t look as surprised to see Craig as Craig wished he did.

“Done moping so soon?” Kenny asked.

“I’m a dick,” Craig said, and shuffled uncomfortably in place. He went back to his spot in the chair opposite Kenny, this time refusing the cigarette offered to him. Craig often wondered what life might be like had he refused the first cigarette that Kenny stuck out at him, but they’d been fourteen and believed themselves immortal, infallible.

“You are,” agreed Kenny mildly, “but you got shit going on. I get it.”

“I think I’m having an existential crisis,” Craig told him.

Kenny huffed out a cloud of smoke. “That sucks.”

“What did you wanna be when you were a kid?” Craig queried.

Kenny pulled a face. He jiggled one leg and turned from Craig to stare into the middle-distance. “Honestly?” he said, “I thought I’d be dead by now.”

“What? Even when you were little?”

“Yeah, man. You’ve fuckin’ met my dad. The rest of you guys were gonna be something. I was just trying to stay alive.”

“What about when we were teenagers?”

“Same thing. Thought I’d be dead by eighteen, no contest. Didn’t think different until I was almost sixteen – that’s when me and Bebe started hooking up. She made me want to be better. Then, you know, everything with Butters happened and it was like – even if these guys ran off into the sunset without me, I at least knew they believed in me. So maybe I could do something with my life. Why?”

“I wanted to be an astronaut when I was kid,” Craig said, “I’m not smart enough, figured that out by high school. After that, everything’s just a fucking blank. Everyone else had plans and ideas and I just – I guess I wanted guinea pigs and a cool car, but that’s it. I wasn’t like Tweek or Jimmy or God, even Clyde. Token didn’t know what he wanted but he figured it out. I just exist and I mean – does it matter? Everything’s gonna rot and the sun’s gonna explode one day, so does any of this matter?”

“Maybe not,” demurred Kenny, “but even if it doesn’t, I think I’d rather go out knowing I did good. I did a tattoo for this chick a couple months ago. She wanted some quote – ‘It’s chaos. Be kind.’ I like that. People use chaos as an excuse to be a fuckin’ bag of assholes, but I’d rather kick that shit to the curb. Be kind. That’s the most punk thing you can do in a world whose people are determined to fill it with douchebaggery.”

Silence ensured in the seconds that followed Kenny’s speech. Craig chewed on the words, then asked, “Do you think I’m a dick to everyone?”

“Not as much as you think you are, I bet,” Kenny answered, “Mostly I think you gotta be nicer to yourself, man.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Craig.

“Exactly what I said,” Kenny told him, and stood. He stretched and popped his spine before glancing at a leather-banded wristwatch that was last year’s Father’s Day present. (As always, Craig groaned at his intimate knowledge of his sort-of-friends)

“I promised my kid I’d play Legos with him before I open up shop today,” Kenny said, “Think about what I said.”

“Get fucked,” Craig replied, cheerful.

Kenny flipped him the bird as he tromped toward the house door and called back, “That’s Craig Tucker for ‘I love you.’”

And damn it, he was right.

**

Craig settled on his roadside-acquired couch with a breakfast sandwich piping hot from the microwave, but as soon as he opened his mouth to bite down, his phone vibrated against his thigh. No one called him but Token and sometimes his mom, so he set aside his food and fished the phone from the depths of his old jeans. An unfamiliar number flashed across the screen – and the only person outside his circle that knew his number was his ex-boyfriend, who, by all accounts, should have been hightailing it out of South Park by now.

“Hey, ups what – _ugh_ ,” Craig pinched the bridge of his nose, “What’s up.”

“Craig!” Tweek exclaimed, “The fucking van died and no one from fucking White’s is picking up their stupid phone! Can you ask – I don’t know – Butters or someone to come get me?”

“I can do it,” Craig said, “I have a car.” Two and a half cars, actually, but who was counting?

“You –” Tweek made a familiar noise, some combination of frustration and anxiety that he used to make when Craig annoyed him. He went on, “I’m on the side of 285. Come get me.” The line went dead.

Craig cast a forlorn look at the coffee table, where he’d placed his breakfast sandwich. He wouldn’t dare take it into any of his cars, considering how much he’d spent on restored leather seats.

Craig looped around the front of the Stotch-McCormick-Stevens house to its other side, where he kept the beloved vehicles he resurrected from metal skeletons and rusted chassis. Out of convenience, he would take the 1959 Aston Martin DB4, since his 1962 Thunderbird lay further in the garage. His poor 1957 BMW 507 Roadster lay in the furthest reaches, half-finished until Craig could afford to order parts again.

With a yank of his hand, the cover fell away from the Aston Martin, the cherry-red paint job Craig so painstakingly executed gleaming in the winter sun that filtered through the clouds and into the open face of the garage.

An old issue of Motor Trend sat abandoned on the passenger seat, a thin film of dust graying its glossy cover. Craig tossed it to the back seat, buckled up, and turned the engine. All around him, the Aston Martin purred to life.

God, being in his cars made him randy. More than porn, more than toys, more than fancy lube or kinky shit, an engine revving, his engine, flicked Craig’s switch in a way that only Tweek had before. Which, shit, he couldn’t be doing right now. He couldn’t get worked up about the smooth roll of the Aston Martin as he back down the cracked driveway and onto the road.

Fucking – damn it. At one of the three stoplights in town, Craig adjusted himself so that his budding erection pressed less obviously against the front of his jeans, and then sped out to the highway.

The road looped and flowed across the mountainous terrain like a great, gorgeous ribbon. Old, grimy snow lingered in the shadows left by gangly conifers and high ground. From the custom sound system, the alternative station hummed grunge under the buzz of tires on tar, and Craig bobbed his head along to the throb of the bass.

This was where he belonged.

At the end of a twist of road and over a pothole, Tweek’s fuck-ugly van sar dead on the shoulder. Craig pulled the Aston Martin into place behind the VW, and Tweek burst from the back doors.

“Whose fucking car is this?” he demanded. His hair showed signs of pulling, and the skin around his nails was pink from picking.

“Mine,” answered Craig.

“Fuck off,” said Tweek.

“It’s mine,” Craig insisted, “I built it. Or rebuilt it. Whatever.”

Tweek gaped at him. He repeated, “You rebuilt this car.”

“Yes.”

“This one. This fancy old car.”

“Yes, I did,” said Craig, “What is your problem?”

“You can do this, and you still worked at your dad’s stupid gas station for a decade?” Tweek said, “Do you know how much rich old white dudes would pay to drive around in a car like this? Like a billion dollars, Craig! I fucking knew you were full of shit.”

“I’m not – they’re just cars,” Craig mumbled.

“Who told you that?”

“No one. I just. I assumed…” Craig trailed off, unable to think of an excuse. He loved his cars; of course he did. That somebody else might love his cars as much as he did hadn’t occurred to him. Craig knew in theory that other people paid a lot of money for restored vintage cars, but he didn’t see how that applied to _his_ vintage cars.

“Whatever,” Craig said, finally. As with all other aspects of his life, none of this was the business of the guy he dated ten years ago, no matter how attached he still felt. “Did you ever get ahold of Bob?”

“Ugh,” Tweek rolled his eyes, “He told me he’d already done what he could and he wouldn’t tow me back until tomorrow, so either I stay out here on a road in the middle of fucking nowhere, see if Karen can drive all the fuck-way up here and take my stupid ass back home, or I go back with you and, I don’t know, hole up in the Motel 6.”

“You don’t have to stay at the motel,” Craig found himself saying, “You could stay with me. I mean my place is like – not ideal, but it’s not…terrible.”

Tweek stepped back and drank Craig in, his eyes scraping from head to toe. His irritated expression gave way to a tentative smile and he said, “Yeah, fine. Why not?”

**

Eerie, nostalgic vibes surrounded that afternoon, as Craig and Tweek rode back to South Park with the words of nineties songs in their mouths. As teenagers they bullshitted about how they were born in the wrong decade – the music of the ten years before them beat what the early aughts had to offer. Craig didn’t think that so much anymore, but there was something to be said about letting the wind whip through the open windows and rustle their hair while they jammed to Dookie, voices lost to the roar of the road.

“ _I am one of those_ ,” Craig sang, nasal and off-key and a loving every second of it.

“ _Melodramatic fools!”_ yelled Tweek.

They shared a grin and laughed, throwing their heads back against those beautiful leather seats.

Something cramped and angry loosened in Craig’s chest, and his entire ribcage flooded with liquid sensation, that old caramel-sticky affection that he used to revel in every time he looked at Tweek in high school. He never knew how he managed to be lucky enough to have such an extraordinary boyfriend, a kid whose creativity split from his hands like a magician’s bouquet, whose thoughts raced faster than any roadster only to congeal in place and freeze Tweek into a ghost.

This adult Tweek, tattooed and grinning wide like some trickster God, inspired the same rolling waves of devotion, fresh as though they’d never been bottled away in some cobwebbed part of Craig’s heart.

Christ, he was fucked.

Everything had changed, but nothing between them was different.

By the time that they made it to Craig’s apartment, the craving between them was palpable. No sooner had Craig opened the door than Tweek had him thrown against it, their mouths crushed together and erections grinding through the denim of their jeans.

“Holy shit,” whispered Craig.

They stumbled over discarded laundry and wayward furniture, tearing at each other’s clothes. Craig and Tweek landed with a bounce on Craig’s mattress in their underwear. Tweek straddled Craig’s lap, pink in the cheek and eyes twinkling as he rolled his hips. He leaned down and swallowed Craig’s gasp in a searing kiss, their lips fraught with ten years of things unspoken.

“I need your hands on me,” panted Tweek, and with his skinny chicken legs and a shove of his palms, he flipped their bodies.

Rather than speak, Craig gripped Tweek’s boxer-briefs in a tight fist and fell backward in his enthusiasm to rip them off. Tweek’s cock lay curved and damp at the tip against his flat, untoned belly. The provocative red of his erection stood out against the pale skin of his abdomen. It begged Craig to touch, and so he did, wrapping thick fingers around the girth and jacking loosely.

“Hnng,” was all that Tweek managed, and Craig smirked. He kissed Tweek’s lips, parting from them with a salacious smile before he moved down to kiss and bite at the enticing column of Tweek’s throat. He traced the tattooed words “ANOTHER WAY” and sucked a hickey onto the head of alien that rested over Tweek’s adam’s apple.

He trailed to scrape his teeth over the bony line of Tweek’s clavicle and pressed the flat of his tongue to Tweek’s nipples, salivating as he teased them to pebbling. Craig wanted to pay Tweek every attention that he deserved, to taste every line and shadow of every piece of ink, to grip that yellow hair and take that waiting cock into his throat.

Craig groaned.

“I’m – can I blow you?” he asked, eyes snapping up to meet Tweek’s heated gaze.

“God,” Tweek moaned, and let his head fall back against Craig’s pillows. “Yes. Do that.”

Tweek widened the space between his legs and let his body fall open on display, all knobby bones and sticker tats and every bit as beautiful as he’d been just a little smaller and bare of ink. This Tweek was a tapestry, a fucking work of art, and in this moment, he belonged to Craig.

Craig pinned Tweek’s hips to the mattress and bowed his head. He pecked tiny, nipping kisses to the skin all around Tweek’s cock but waited to let his mouth touch hard, hot flesh until Tweek thrashed under his ministrations. He complained, “What are you waiting for? Put my fucking cock in your mouth, Craig – _uhhnn_.”

Craig opened his mouth and let the first inches of Tweek’s erection slide past his lips. Tweek overwhelmed every one his senses: the musky, salty taste of dick, the echo of incense stinging Craig’s nostrils, the sight of his full-body blush when Craig dared look up from his ministrations, the punched-out gasps peppered with _unh-unh-unh_ as Craig sucked, and Jesus, the sharp press of his bones under Craig’s palms.

Tweek’s hand carded through Craig’s hair and fisted. Fiery pleasure-pain danced across Craig’s scalp as he bobbed his head, laving and sucking like he’d never stopped giving Tweek Tweak head. It was sloppy and loud, but neither of them cared, squirming on Craig’s bed in a knot of limbs. Craig’s hips moved forward of their own volition as he worked, and despite fucking against nothing but the heated air between their bodies, he was hard as a stone.

Tweek thrust up into his mouth and tightened his grip on Craig’s hair, and Craig came undone. A shocked moan vibrated from his lungs around the length of Tweek’s cock in his mouth as he came untouched in threadbare boxer shorts.

“Oh, fuck,” Tweek said, “Did you just come in your shorts? That’s so fucking hot.”

A whine stuck in Craig’s throat and he redoubled his efforts, trying to remember how to relax his throat but not quite being able to call back old skill. He made up for it with enthusiasm, and closed his fist around the part of Tweek’s erection he couldn’t quite swallow down.

“Shit, I’m close,” Tweek told him, and Craig hummed.

Tweek came with his pelvis frantically trying to push further into Craig, one hand clawed in Craig’s hair and the other scrabbling for purchase in the sheets. He made a soft, high noise of satisfaction and warmth splashed against Craig’s throat. He swallowed every drop before he pulled off and admired Tweek trembling from the aftershock, eyes hazy with pleasure.

Craig collapsed at Tweek’s side. The stickiness in his shorts would be awful as soon as it dried, but right now, there was no place he wanted to be more than next to Tweek.

“We’re so dumb,” Craig said softly.

Tweek nodded, but shifted to wrap his arms around Craig’s shoulders. He pulled their bodies tight together and said, “Sex with you is a terrible idea, but you have to admit, it’s a really _great_ terrible idea.”

Craig laughed into Tweek’s mussed hair and agreed, “Honey, we were always full of terrible ideas.”


	6. Taste the Salt

**Chapter Track: Waves - Blondfire**

**Chapter Six**

_**Taste the Salt** _

The residual scent of sex overlaid that of the old Chinese food that had become a staple of Craig’s apartment. Knocking rattled the fuzzy forefront of his mind, but he didn’t want to wake up, not when he could roll into the warm body pressed to his beneath the covers.

“Craig.”

“No,” he groaned, and shoved his face against an available patch of skin. Tweek smelled a little of incense.

“Craig. Come on. Somebody’s at your door.”

“No,” Craig reiterated. He attempted to snuggle ever-closer to the body in the bed, but freezing hands pushed him back.

Tweek’s voice said, “If you won’t answer it, I will.” Heat pulled away from him – both body and blanket – and Craig grumbled in complaint. Opening his eyes seemed insurmountably difficult; he didn’t want to leave the comfortable curtain of sleep.

Only – a moment later – Craig realized the implications of allowing Tweek to answer the door. No one realized Craig had taken Tweek out of South Park, let alone brought him back into it, _much less_ spent an entire day screwing around in bed and watching conspiracy documentaries on Netflix. They smoked weed from the same pipe that Craig owned his high school, the same pipe that touched their teenage lips and fueled their young philosophies.

The surreality of it all sent Craig spinning into musings of time loops and quantum tunneling, of phasing back into his teenage atoms to watch horror movies in the den at his parents’ house with Tweek tucked under his arm, hiding his face at the crescendo of foreboding music.

Now Tweek headed toward the door – presumably wrapped in the cheap-ass space themed blanket Craig bought at Wal-Mart when he first moved out of his folks’ place.

And no one knew that Tweek had spent the night with Craig.

Craig’s eyes burst open and he gasped to sitting, but it was too late. Planet blanket draped ‘round his thin frame like a puffy toga, Tweek opened the door without a stitch of shame.

“Oh!”

Oh. Christ. That was Butters’ voice. What was Butters doing – Craig fumbled for his phone, cast aside on a pile of clothing scrunched at the end of the bed – _eight in the morning_? Craig would have intervened, but he didn’t have a damn thing on. He reached for a pair of relatively clean-looking sweatpants a few feet from his bed, but tripped and landed in a heap on the carpet.

“Is that Craig?” he could hear Butters ask from behind Tweek, and then raise his voice, “Heya, Craig, me n’ Bebe and n’ Kenny wanted to know if you wanted some pancakes or something, but I see you’ve got company, so…”

“I like pancakes,” said Tweek.

Oh, God. Oh no. What was he getting them into.

“Well, of course you do!” Butters brightly answered, “Why don’t I let you fellas get decent, and you can join us in a few? Don’t worry about bein’ in PJs or nothin’; we’re not fancy.”

“Sounds great to me!” Tweek said, and Craig could hear his grin, the rat bastard. He knew he was sentencing Craig to awkward breakfast, and he didn’t care. He probably relished the opportunity to see Craig squirm, as he always had.

When Tweek closed the front door, he leaned against it and quirked a brow at Craig.

“You’re an asshole,” griped Craig, but there was no heat in it. He pulled his sweatpants up over his hips, snapping the elastic waistband into place.

“Come on. Did you really think I’d pass up the opportunity to see this throuple shit in action? Nobody told me they got _married_.”

“I mean – sort of. Bebe’s legally married to Kenny, but the ceremony was all three of them. And then the reception was like…getting high in the woods in fancy outfits.”

“You _went_?”

“Would’ve been kind of rude not to.”

Tweek shed the blanket. He didn’t seek out his own clothing, instead plucking up Craig’s laundry and wiggling into it. Craig’s jeans, as they always had, sagged low on his hips, though the Soundgarden t-shirt he’d procured didn’t look as unreasonable in size.

“Like high school all over again, huh?” Tweek said, when he caught Craig looking him up and down.

“Yeah,” admitted Craig, not sure whether such a feeling was good or bad. He scrounged up a shirt, one of the too-many Nirvana tees he had in his repertoire, and slid his feet into well-worn leather flip-flops that he wore in the summers.

Tweek marveled at the inside of the McCormick-Stotch-Stevens house, probably as amazed as Craig was that the place looked like it belonged to adult human beings (minus Kenny’s superhero tchotchkes) and not the depraved den on iniquity that their parents all thought it to be.

The only one of the parents to the throuple that visited regularly was Carol McCormick, who had only been allowed to visit Booker on the condition that she went through drug rehab – and she had. To Carol’s credit, she kicked meth on her son’s dime and hadn’t touched it since the birth of her grandson.

(“She said the kid’s more important than any craving,” Kenny’d said, “Wish the same had been true of me and Kev and Karen, but you can’t have it all, I guess.” He looked proud nonetheless.)

“Uncle Craig!” cried Booker, and launched his pull-up-clad body at Craig full-force. Tweek made a face as though to question _Uncle Craig_? – Craig patted Booker’s honey-blond bedhead with one hand and lifted the other to flip Tweek the bird.

“Hey kid,” Craig greeted, “You still annoying your parents for me?”

“Maybe,” Booker said, with a gummy smile.

“That’s the spirit,” said Craig, before he swept a hand back at his stupid ex-boyfriend to introduce, “This is Tweek. He went to school with me and your parents, and now he’s a famous artist.”

“Why’s he here?” Booker wanted to know.

“Because,” Butters interrupted, sweeping into the entry way. Despite greenlighting pajamas as breakfast attire, he was fully dressed in a pair of thigh-hugging jeans and a fruity-looking gingham button-down. He fixed a pointed look at Craig and Tweek and went on, “Tweek is here to see his old friends.”

Message received: _Don’t you dare talk about bumping uglies in front of my spawn._

Butters led them to the dining room, where Bebe sat with a book open across her placemat, her curly hair pilled into a topknot. She, too, was dressed for the day – plush body fitted in a red sweater dress, with one of her weird bone-jewelry necklaces strategically draped so the pendant hung an inch above her cleavage. Her brows soared at the sight of Tweek, brow-raising fuck that she was.

“ _Not a word_ ,” Craig mouthed at her, and those brows climbed ever-higher.

“Nice to see you, Bebe,” Tweek said, deceptively polite, “How’s parenting?”

“One of the best accidents to ever happen to me,” she replied, “How’s being an internet sensation?”

“Challenging,” Tweek told her.

Tweek and Bebe eyed one another, not unlike cowboys facing off in an old western. Bebe won, holding Tweek’s gaze until he fidgeted and glanced back at Craig, an uncertain, queasy expression on his face.

Good. He got them into this. He could suffer too.

Kenny strolled in from the kitchen with a sizzling pan in his hand, the contents of which (breakfast potatoes) he scraped onto an empty platter in the center of the dining table while his eyes darted from his spouses, to his child, to Craig and Tweek.

“Eyyy,” Kenny said, pointing the frying pan between them, “Fuckbuddies! I knew it.”

“ _Kenny_ ,” Bebe and Butters chided in stereo.

Kenny didn’t look the least bit sorry. He shrugged and said, “What? It’s true.”

Booker, meanwhile, asked, “What’s fuckbuddies?”

**

“That was so awkward,” Tweek chortled – Craig didn’t think he knew what _chortling_ sounded like until Tweek let out the noise. “Did you see the look Bebe gave Kenny when he said we’re fuckbuddies in front of the kid? Classic!”

“Would’ve destroyed you, back in the day,” Craig remarked.

“Yeah,” Tweek said, “It would have. And awkward breakfast would’ve been no skin off your ass, but you’re tense as all hell, so what the fuck happened?”

Craig shrugged, abruptly hot under his shirt. He didn’t know. Did he look like he knew what happened to his own life, to his personality? He sure as shit didn’t know where his teenage confidence fucked off to. Skepticism ruled supreme where fearlessness once made its name, and Craig was a fucking mess in the wake of it all.

No, he wasn’t a mess. He knew what he was doing. He was existing in that in-between space, like he always did, and here was Tweek, who thought that he knew best, as he always had. His conspiracy theory diet inspired the egoism of believing he knew better than anyone else, that he knew the truth and all others were simply blind to it.

“Why are you like this?” demanded Craig, overtaken by a rare rush of anger, “I’m different than I was in high school. So the fuck what? Isn’t that a good thing?”

Tweek leaned his hip against Craig’s kitchen countertop and looked at his well-bitten nails. “Fuckin’ maybe, if you weren’t so profoundly unhappy.”

“How is that any of your business? I’m comfortable the way that I am,” Craig defended, surprised by the ire that slipped inside him and slotted into place, “You left. You all left. I built a life without you. What makes you think that you can just blaze the fuck back into it and wreck me?”

Tweek’s mouth, open with a ready argument, snapped closed.

“Is that what I do?” he asked, cold and dangerous.

“Yeah,” Craig said, “You do. I was minding my own goddamned business. I tried to leave you alone, because we’ve been over for – forever, okay? You’re the one that pulled me into Kenny’s shop. You’re the one that wanted to have sex. You’re the one that invited me to your dad’s stupid cocktail party, and you’re the one that called me to bail you out when your van took a shit. So what’s the deal? You’re _also_ the one who broke up with me.”

Tweek lifted his body from the counter and loomed into Craig’s space.

“We weren’t the same people we were in high school,” Tweek said.

“So what?” Craig carried on, “You didn’t care how it would affect me. You just threw me away, like all the crap we went through back then didn’t mean shit to you. You’re so selfish.”

“Yeah, I am!” snapped Tweek, “And I’m glad I am. I dedicated all my energy to uplifting my terrible parents as a kid, and I never asked for anything. Now I get to draw the lines. I get to say what I want.”

“Then what the fuck do you want with me?” Craig pressed.

“I don’t know! I don’t know, okay?”

Craig cracked open his fists and jerked Tweek forward. Their faces hovered mere millimeters apart, breath hot and mingling. He bit out, “Well fucking decide, because I’m tired of being jerked around by your bullshit.”

Tweek laughed, like the asshole he was. He replied, “That’s not what you said last night, is it?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Craig said.

“Why don’t you?” Tweek asked, “Channel all your stupid angst. Do it. I goddamn dare you. Fuck me.”

“Fine,” Craig growled. He hefted up and threw Tweek’s gawky body toward his rumpled bed. Tweek bounced against the mattress, springs squealing beneath his paltry weight. Craig tore his clothes off in one tangled mass of cotton, then trapped Tweek in the cage of his limbs.

“You’re such a shitlord,” he said, and leaned down to breathe Tweek into a furious kiss, all teeth and no affection, just the raw, pissed-off energy that coursed through Craig’s veins. He could just as easily strangle Tweek as he could bite into his mouth, but he chose to kiss, and kiss violently. Tweek gave as good as he got, meeting bite for bite as he dug his teeth into Craig’s throat.

A bolt of arousal flashed from the pain – both literal and figurative – in Craig’s neck, flooding his senses and awakening one hell of an erection.

“You’re just mad I’m right,” whispered Tweek.

A snarl tore from the pit of Craig’s belly, animal-like and wounded. He grit out, “You’re not always right. Sometimes you’re wrong.”

“This time I’m right,” Tweek said, that sly smile stretching kiss-swollen lips.

“No,” Craig said, shoving wet kisses to Tweek’s neck, “the fuck,” – he wrenched his t-shirt up off Tweek’s body – “you’re not.”

Craig divested Tweek of the jeans that belonged to him, leaving him naked and splayed across the bed. Tweek propped himself up on his elbows and his stupid grin widened. He asked, “Are you gonna fuck me or what? You look pretty pissed off, Craig.”

“I am,” Craig spat on, “I’m fucking furious.”

Maybe Tweek hadn’t wrecked Craig’s life, but he sure as hell had disrupted it. In the calm tides of Craig’s routine, Tweek was a tsunami, crashing in and shifting every known variable to uncontrolled. How little Craig knew – and how painfully aware having Tweek back in his bed made him of this fact. He thought he left Tweek in the past, but the truth was that there was a space carved out in Craig’s heart for him, there always, a permanent fixture.

“I hate you so much,” Craig said.

“No you don’t,” Tweek challenged, and fuck him, he was right. Why did he have to be right?

Craig grappled for the lube shoved between his mattress and shitty, squeaky bedframe and manhandled Tweek onto his stomach, ass in the air. He’d always liked sex like this when they were idiot kids; maybe he still liked it.

“Jesus, yes,” breathed Tweek, fisting the sheets in the dry skin of his hands. “Show me how wrong I am.”

“Fuck you,” Craig said.

“Promises, promises.”

A loud _crack_ sounded as Craig’s hand made contact with Tweek’s asscheek, and Craig commanded, “Shut up. Just – for once in your life. Shut up.”

Tweek moaned and rolled his spine like a pleased cat, ass swaying. He purred, “Why don’t you make me?”

Craig poured lube on his fingers and didn’t bother to warn Tweek. Instead, he threaded his fingers through Tweek’s hair with his left hand, and, with his right, pushed a thick digit inside him. Tweek’s entire body twitched, but Craig held steady. He shoved Tweek’s head down into the pillows. Little whimpers floated up from the body beneath him as Craig fingered him open dispassionately, like it was a chore, because he was angry and Tweek had never cared much for foreplay anyhow.

When Craig dragged the head of his dick between Tweek’s cheeks, a whimper morphed into a full-blown groan. He inched his ass higher into the air, but Craig smacked him again, over the pink skin where he first laid the flat of his hand. Tweek squirmed and gasped, “You’re terrible. Just do it already!”

“Not yet,” simpered Craig, because he was in charge. Tweek could spit orders all he wanted, but this time, Craig was in the driver’s seat. He’d give pleasure when he felt like it, not at the demand of the skinny fuck that kept meddling with his life.

Tweek writhed beneath him, and only when he began to beg did Craig humor him, withdrawing his slick fingers to lube up his cock. He held his erection steady and, instead of pinning Tweek and fucking him into the mattress as he demanded, Craig watched his dick disappear one sensual inch at a time into the tight clutch of Tweek’s body.

“Agh, yeah,” Tweek managed, a shiver vibrating through him.

Rather than the impassioned, furious fucking Craig knew that Tweek was angling for, he pushed into Tweek in controlled, measured thrusts. The slow pace teased frustrated noise from below him. Tweek attempted to cant his ass back to take Craig’s erection further into him, but Craig held him down by the head, pushing him to stillness as he rode into him like calm tides.

“You can’t come until I do,” Craig murmured.

“Nghhh – you fuckface, that’s hard to control!”

“I know,” Craig said, “but you’re gonna do it anyway, because I told you to.”

For both their sakes, Craig picked up his pace and drove into him harder, still controlled, still measured, but more powerful. His orgasm built in his balls and belly, hot and liquid. He didn’t bother to pull out. Instead, he tugged Tweek back on his cock with fingers bruising the tender skin of his thighs and came with a force he didn’t know he needed, orgasm so potent and heady that his brain swam for several seconds before it came back online.

Craig pushed Tweek onto his back again, careless to the come leaking onto the sheets, and bent to swallow him down. No more than thirty seconds later Tweek burst, filling Craig’s mouth with the salt of his release.

Several minutes passed in which they lay on their backs side by side, not touching, but close.

“I’m so pissed at you,” Craig said at the ceiling.

“Sex didn’t help?” Tweek asked, sliding his green-hazel eyes to stare at Craig.

“Kind of,” Craig hummed noncommittally. He peeled his sweaty back off of the sticky sheets and trekked naked across the apartment to brew a pot of coffee and retrieve his phone.

Tweek closed his eyes and reclined nude while the scent of cheap, pre-ground beans percolating clouded the studio apartment. Craig dared take the opportunity to scrape his eyes over the wonderful bastard, over his sex-pink skin and haywire hair. Christ – after all these years, he loved looking at Tweek as much as he had as a teenager. Blank skin or beautiful canvas, Tweek drew the eye, and fool that he was, Craig would worship at his altar.

He shook his head. Anger still bubbled inside him, but it bubbled alongside old affection.

Against the counter, Craig’s phone lit up. He plucked it up with a measure of surprise. Few people bothered to talk to him – ah. Jimmy.

**[10:07 AM] rustle my jimmies:** _you coming to my show tomorrow night?_

**[10:07 AM] Craigular Guy:** _fucking duh_

Craig tilted his attention the bed and met Tweek’s eyes.

“You wanna come to Jimmy’s show tomorrow?” he asked.

“I always go when he’s in Denver,” Tweek said, “Didn’t know you did, though.”

Craig’s heart skipped a beat. Tweek had been at Jimmy’s shows? All along? The whole time?

“We get drinks after,” Craig slowly replied, “You…wanna join us?”

Tweek shrugged, “Sure, why the hell not?”

**[10:09 AM] Craigular Guy:** _tweeks comin for drinks too_

**[10:10 AM] rustle my jimmies:** _that’s sure something_

**[10:11 AM] rustle my jimmies:** _can’t wait to see this mess_

**[10:11 AM] Craigular Guy:** _fuck off_


	7. The Lie it Looks Like

**Chapter Track: Hunger and Thirst – Typhoon**

**Chapter Seven**

_**The Lie It Looks Like** _

Tweek’s apartment building was the apartment building dreams were made of, or it would be, if Craig didn’t hate driving in downtown Denver so goddamned much. It was a luxury apartment complex, something full to the brim with young executives and forty-something bachelors…and Tweek. An underground garage safely housed Craig’s beloved Aston Martin, in a reserved parking space because this was one of _those_ places.

“I can’t believe you live here,” Craig said.

The words echoed into an unnecessarily hip lobby, with real, actual art decking the walls on giant, abstract canvases, a set of solid, jewel-toned couches, and a fuzzy, pelt-looking rug with no form. A security guard headed the front desk. He blinked up from his book to scan their faces and offered a wave to Tweek, who did finger guns back at the dude like the giant nerd he was.

In the elevator, Tweek smirked at Craig, folding his arms over his bony chest.

“Remember that time we almost got caught screwing around in the elevator at school?” he asked.

Craig hid his eyes in hands and muttered, “Why did we do that.”

“’Cause we were young and dumb,” shrugged Tweek, “Are you saying you wouldn’t jerk me off in an elevator anymore?”

“Now we’re old and dumb,” sighed Craig, “and no. I wouldn’t.”

Tweek snorted, “You’re not old. You’re twenty-seven.”

“I feel old,” Craig said.

“You’re not,” Tweek assured him. He animated from his slouch and crossed the elevator, resting his hand on the wall beside Craig’s head. Tweek leaned in and kissed him, slow and gentle and nothing like the frantic, angry kisses they’d been sharing to that point. Craig inhaled, startled, and pulled Tweek in close. He craved the touch and the affection, though he’d never cop to that – Tweek would laugh, maybe.

Whatever. Tweek probably remembered that Craig liked being cuddled, in any case. In high school, after they fucked or messed around or even made out a little, Craig tucked his body into the thin parenthesis of Tweek, pretended Tweek was big enough to surround him and swallow him whole. He lost himself there, in the circle of Tweek’s arms and bracket of his legs. Lost, but safe. Craig missed the feeling.

Losing that sucked more than he cared to admit.

“That time in the elevator,” Tweek breathed against Craig’s lips, “Broflovski caught us, remember?”

Craig groaned. He didn’t want to remember. He didn’t want to remember any of the shit from back then, because remembering made him _want_. He wanted his teenage confidence, his teenage devil-may-care attitude, his teenage fucking boyfriend. Hell, he wanted his teenage sister and his teenage guinea pigs while he was at it.

“Why was it always Kyle,” he wondered out loud, instead of voicing the litany of inconvenient desires boiling his guts.

“No wonder he kinda hated us,” Tweek said.

“He definitely saw your dick at least twice,” agreed Craig.

On the fifth floor, Tweek and Craig made their way down a mood-lit, wide hallway. Tweek lived around a corner, in what could only be described as the most massive apartment that Craig had ever set foot in. He’d been in nice joints before – Token’s parents were well off, and Bebe’s folks didn’t do too bad either – but nothing so fundamentally _city_. Huge windows overlooked 16 th Street Mall, where bustling humanity wriggled beneath them past the mishmash of trendy restaurants and cheesy souvenir shops, lit in the twilight by street lamps and neon OPEN signs.

The open floor plan lent the space the air of being large, even under the weight of Tweek’s huge, overstuffed couch and plethora of strange knickknacks, from misshapen pottery to vintage scifi posters to what looked like ghost-hunting equipment, if Craig’s Hulu binges were anything to go by.

“I’m gonna shower,” Tweek said through a yawn, stretching, “in a shower that doesn’t look like it’s growing an intelligent civilization. Can you make me coffee that doesn’t suck?”

“Jesus, drag me,” Craig complained, but he puttered to the kitchen to follow instructions anyway.

Tweek didn’t own a traditional coffee maker, because of course he didn’t. What he did own was a glass, hipster pour-over monstrosity that required Craig’s full attention to use. But he had to admit when he wandered away with a cup of his own hand-poured coffee that the shit tasted fucking fantastic.

Craig meandered to Tweek’s bookshelf, which housed an unholy blend of pulp novels, comic book trade paperbacks, and some of the same yaoi that he’d had in high school. Craig slid one volume from its place and flipped to a random page – _Oh Christ, that was filthy –_ and stuffed the book back into its slot, a furious blush hot on his face.

“Like what you see?”

Craig whirled around so fast he spilled coffee down the front of his t-shirt. While the sound of the shower running beat down in the background, Tweek stood almost wholly naked, a green towel slung low around skinny hips. A trim line of dark blond hair darted from his navel and into the terrycloth, guiding Craig’s eyes down.

Tweek started to laugh, and the towel jiggled with the movement of his body. It seemed destined to fall.

“You are such a fucking creeper,” Tweek giggled.

“What,” Craig managed, nerves thickening his throat.

“You wanna have sex with me,” Tweek replied.

“Wow,” Craig deadpanned, “You sure caught me, fuckstick. I thought that was a secret.”

“I mean you want it right here, right now. Don’t you?” Tweek asked.

Craig’s eyes shifted to the alien-themed clock above the front door. They had a little over an hour until Jimmy’s set, and then they’d be getting drinks at some 24-hour place called Leela European Café, so Tweek could get his caffeine fix with his booze.

“We don’t have time,” Craig said.

Tweek sidled up to him, his smirk ever-present and his hair dark with moisture. A bead of water dripped from one spiky edge of Tweek’s hair to his clavicle and dripped down between what might have been pecs on a man with any bulk at all. Craig’s eyes followed the trail down Tweek’s hollow abdomen and over the lines of several tattoos before the drip vanished into the edge of the towel.

Craig already knew what was under that towel.

“Are you sure?” Tweek asked, teasing. He knew. He knew that no matter what happened, no matter how many years passed between them, that Craig would always want him – would always be ready for him.

His toes pressed against the edges of Craig’s shoes, then, and Tweek let the towel drop onto the ground. His dick looked so unassuming flaccid, but Craig knew better than that. That dick had seen him through some unbelievable orgasms, some of those far too recent for comfort. He gulped back the nerves – tried to, anyway – and let Tweek cup his face in one of those elegant hands.

Of course, Craig ended up bent in half over the back of the couch with his pants caught around his combat boots, and Tweek reaming him into next week. He dug his nails into the fabric and held steady, but the powerful strokes of Tweek’s body forced him up against the back of the sofa, dick rubbing for brief, torturous seconds against something solid.

Craig let his forehead fall onto the cushion beneath him and groaned. He couldn’t do anything but hold on and pray that he didn’t come all over his black t-shirt.

Which he did, naturally, because why would the impartial universe cut Craig a fucking break?

He ended up wearing one of Tweek’s larger shirts, though it still cut into his chub and gave Craig a lumpier appearance than he cared for. He zipped his hoodie over the mess of his body, tried not to feel as sticky as he did, and walked with only a little hesitation into the bar where Jimmy would be performing.

They were late by fifteen minutes, because they were assholes, but the opener was on stage once they’d conferred with the ticket guy and let him know both Craig Tucker and Tweek Tweak were on Jimmy’s list.

The chick opening for Jimmy garnered several laughs, but Craig couldn’t focus on anything but the ache in his ass when he tried to situate. No matter what side of his ass he rested his weight on, the reminder of what he and Tweek had been up to throbbed through his body, and he shifted. Side to side, front to back –

Tweek rested a hand on Craig’s shoulder and murmured, “Stop. Stay still and feel it.”

Fuck, that was hot. Why was every goddamn thing that Tweek Tweak did so hot?

The opener dipped in a bow, having finished while Craig heated up under his collar. Scattered applause and a few cheers guided her from the stage, while an emcee introduced: “You know him, you love him – it’s _Jimmy Valmer_!” The club burst into whoops of delight as Jimmy made his way on stage, waving with one hand as he navigated up to the mic.

“What a g-g-great crowd,” he greeted, and they went wild, like they always did.

**

Leela European Café projected a college town vibe despite its potion in the heart of Denver, from the hipster crowd clustered at the tables, to the tattooed bar staff, to the inexplicable surfboards that dangled from the ceiling. Jimmy, somehow, arrived before Craig and Tweek, and nursed a beer at a circular table near the center of the space.

In their later years of high school, Jimmy took up weightlifting – he never stopped, and his twenty-seven-year-old body boasted broad, muscled shoulders beneath a yellow Adidas jacket. Craig’s shoulders were comparable only through the fruits of genetics, but his arms had nothing on the definition cut beneath Jimmy’s sleeves.

Craig and Tweek ordered cocktails at the bar, and then joined Jimmy at his lonely table in the center of the late-night chaos.

“Well, w—–well, well,” Jimmy smirked at them, “What do we h-here?” His smirk persisted, even as he knocked back another swallow of beer.

“Fuck off,” Craig said, at the same time that Tweek lifted his shoulders and gave a careless, “We’re boning again, yeah.”

“Should have f-f-foreseen the return of Craig T-Tucker, Dick Sucker,” Jimmy teased.

“Ha-ha,” Craig said, “Hey, why’d you skip leg day?”

Jimmy laughed, and then laughed harder when Craig shifted in his seat. He asked, “Uh-uh-uhn— comfortable, Craig?”

“You’re the worst,” replied Craig, “I just want you to know that.”

“R-R-Riii-Right back at you, a-asshole,” Jimmy said, “So, w-what’s new?”

Craig sunk his teeth into his lower and debated how to answer that question. He hadn’t done anything interesting – except, of course, Tweek – and more than anything life had been happening to him one miserable day after the next. Craig was but a passenger in in this day, in this week, in this month – in this life. He hated answering the perfunctory _how are you doing_ and _what’s going on_ , because he didn’t know how or what he was doing, and he never knew what the fuck was going on.

Tweek slid forward and offered Jimmy that stupid, mischievous smile. He said, “I’m doing g-great, man! Craig let me raw him over my couch like three hours ago.”

Craig smeared his hands over his face.

Jimmy rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “A-and I’m going to be sleeping on that couch. F-f-fuh-fantastic.”

“Don’t worry, Craig came all over himself, not the furniture,” Tweek responded.

“Can we not discuss rawing me over your couch and where I came, please,” Craig asked, knowing that he was after a fruitless cause. Tweek would take any excuse to see Craig squirm – whether that was from rough sex or ruthless teasing.

Rather than look his friends in the eye, Craig sucked up his sweet cocktail through the straw and pretended he didn’t exist. He was not here on this plane of existence with the assholes he chose to align himself with, but floating outside his body, outside the planet, made up of stardust and nothingness.

“Craig? Craig!” Tweek snapped his fingers to get Craig’s attention, then murmured to Jimmy, “He does this sometimes.”

“That’s – not g-great,” Jimmy said.

“I’m fine,” grumped Craig, “You’re just fucking embarrassing me.”

“T-t-tuh-touchy,” Jimmy murmured.

The addition of Tweek to their party made this visit so much less appealing that nausea rolled in Craig’s gut. In high school, Tweek liked to make Craig blush, liked to share what Craig thought to be private information, and Craig hadn’t minded so much, then. Back then, any TMI Tweek Tweak offered revealed that Craig was getting laid on the reg, something that none of the others could boast. Being teenagers, sex was pinnacle to their existence – it hung over them, a constant want and dread all at once.

Sex was a competition – they’d talk about how far they’d gotten, and Tweek and Craig would always win.

Craig didn’t feel motivated by that rivalry anymore. No one cared if you’d gotten worked over by your…whatever Tweek was.

While Tweek and Jimmy bantered about their successes and their sex-cesses, Craig kept quiet, wandering back to the bar to buy a couple more rounds for all of them with the limited funds remaining in his bank account. He may as well use what he had to blur the entirety of this miserable night, because frankly, he didn’t need to remember Tweek talking Grindr or Jimmy rattling off the parade of one-night stands he’d indulged.

They ended up walking back to Tweek’s apartment after Jimmy seemed miffed at the suggestion he’d want an Uber to travel a mere few blocks.

Unlit, Tweek’s apartment looked less like the collector’s fortress it was and more like a science fiction nightmare cubicle. A UFO-themed lamp glowed purple on the bookshelf while three different lava lamps above the television moved hypnotically, their dim illumination casting more shadow than light onto the room beneath them.

Then, Tweek flicked the light switch, and the illusion shattered.

Craig faded into the background while Tweek unfurled his pull-out couch and chattered with Jimmy. Their voices crackled like static on the radio while he stared out the window, out at nothing. The glare from the lights inside bounced back from the glass and only the outlines of the city below were visible, the detail gone from the world.

Craig felt like that, sometimes – undetailed. Sometimes he was a silhouette that the universe forgot to fill in, and he paled in comparison to his friends – the comedians and artists and doctors and football players. He existed in an in-between state while others lived fulfilling lives. Other people had stories to share and funny anecdotes about their stumbles, but had Craig even stumbled? He was stagnant, bobbing through his life, doing what he always did. There was no stumbling, and he still felt like this failed thing, an experiment gone wrong, a flask whose materials fizzed out of it and left empty glass behind.

“Craig?”

Tweek touched his arm, and Craig flinched.

“Sorry,” he said, “What.”

“Jimmy’s pretty beat, so we’re gonna head to bed,” Tweek said, “You didn’t hear any of that, man?”

Craig shook his head. He said, “Wasn’t paying attention.”

Tweek cast an indecipherable look back at Jimmy, who returned something of the same ilk. Tweek steered Craig’s body out of the main space of the apartment and to his bedroom, which, much like his van, looked like the combined living space of a conspiracy theorist-slash-artist, which was approximately the truth. A drafting table, littered with sketches and tracing paper, took up most of one wall. More bookshelves lived in the bedroom than in the more public area of the apartment, these packed to the brim with anything and everything.

Tweek put all his favorites on display and hid the messiness, Craig thought.

“Craig,” Tweek said again. He’d closed the bedroom door behind them.

“What.”

“The fuck is with you tonight?” asked Tweek, “You just like – checked the fuck out, man!”

“You and Jimmy were busy,” shrugged Craig.

“What are you talking about? You were _there_ ,” Tweek said. His brows crunched together, and there was no trickster smile. The playfulness vanished from his face, replaced by an expression Craig didn’t recognize. It was nothing from high school, nothing that he could recall from their wild teenagehood, but something grown.

“I think,” Tweek said, “you’re dissociating.”

“What the fuck is that,” Craig asked, flat, “I’m not crazy.”

 _Not like you_ went unsaid, and perhaps once Tweek would have risen to the bait. Instead, he crossed his arms over his skinny chest and said, “It’s like…you separate from yourself. I think you’re depressed, man. I know I said that before but I need you to listen to me. Okay? You’re not okay.”

“I’m fine,” Craig answered. “I’m not sad.”

“I’m in a time loop,” whispered Tweek.

“You’re not in a fucking time loop,” Craig said, “I’m telling you that I’m fine, okay? I don’t know why you think that it’s your business. I fucking told you that.”

“Because I care about you!” burst Tweek, “I don’t fucking know why, but don’t you feel it, too? Maybe we thought we left each other behind in high school, but the more time I spend with you, the more I –” Tweek went silent.

“The more you what?” Craig asked.

“The more I realize that I never left you behind at all,” Tweek confessed, “I always thought of you, always think of you. When I saw a cool car or, God, a guinea pig…I never left you anywhere.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Craig said, “You did. You all did. You left me behind, and you moved on with your lives. What did I do? I worked for my dad, like I always did, and even that wasn’t enough. I’m not enough for anyone.”

“That’s not true,” Tweek said, firm.

Craig made a helpless gesture at the room around them. He said, “Then what’s this? You moved on. And yeah, you came back, but you came back because your parents are pricks and pressured you into it.”

“No,” Tweek said, “I came back for you.”

“The hell you did,” Craig said.

“It’s true,” Tweek assured him, “Yeah, my mom guilted me, but she does that all the time. That’s her MO, man. The reason I went along with it was because I wanted to see _you_.”

For a long stretch of silence, Craig couldn’t think what to say. He knew he cared about Tweek, and though he’d neatly boxed Tweek up in the back of his head, he’d always known that Tweek existed there, that he would never truly leave him.

His first love.

His first heartbreak.

His _only_ love.

His _only_ heartbreak.

Craig never dreamed the same might hold true for Tweek.

“Why,” he asked, “why didn’t you ever talk to me again?”

Tweek wet his lips with the tip of his tongue and broke their gaze. He looked at his shoes and said, “I was scared.”

“You,” Craig managed, “You. _You_ were scared.”

“I’m afraid of a lot of things,” Tweek said, “You know that.”

“But you stopped letting that dictate your life. You’re the one that told me that,” Craig said.

“And I lied a little, okay? I know I fucked things up between us, and I didn’t think that there was anything that I could do to fix it. But I think maybe, m-maybe you still care about me too. A little.”

Craig nodded, unable to form words. He rasped when he next spoke: “Yeah, Tweek. I still care about you.”

A sludge of emotions washed over Tweek’s face, one after another, each there and gone before Craig could identify what was what. In the end, Tweek softly said, “You do?”

Craig’s legs propelled him forward before his brain could catch up. He stroked his hand through Tweek’s soft hair and dragged the pad of his thumb across his temple before leaning down to press a kiss there. His heart jerked out of time in his chest, a mess of stickiness and fear and hope and every awful and wonderful thing that his body could possibly contain.

“Tweek…” he sighed.

“Mm.”

“I never stopped caring about you. Never stopped wanting you. I’m not – you know I suck at this, at words and shit,” Craig said, “but you’re my – my world.”

Tweek shook his head and said, “I’m not your world, but I’d like to be a part of it.”


	8. The Point of Going Somewhere

**Chapter Track: Blossom – Milky Chance**

**Chapter Eight**

_**The Point of Going Somewhere** _

A mattress too new and comfortable woke Craig, not a single spring poked into his spine. Natural light cascaded in and warmed his skin, and when he dared take in his surroundings, the previous night railed into him. Startled, he sat up in the bed, surprised to find the same space-themed bedset that lay in his own, far drearier apartment.

The other side of the bed sat empty, the sheets cold to the touch when Craig ran his palm over the star-speckled surface.

In the light of day, the resemblance of Tweek’s adult bedroom to what he had in high school took Craig aback. He slid out from under the covers to cross the room, to touch the rows of familiar books that Tweek used to ramble about when they lay tangled together on his mattress. Richard Tweak was a fuck of a dad, but for all his strange behavior, he didn’t seem to mind that Craig and Tweek spent most of their “studying” going down on each other.

At the time, they imagined they were being subtle, but in retrospect being alone together in Tweek’s bedroom for hours on end was its own giveaway.

Despite drinking little, the crush of a hangover clutched Craig’s temples, and queasiness pierced his insides.

But then, how much _did_ he drink?

Craig wracked his mind for the memories of the drinks he ordered and how many times he returned to the bar, but found nothing but static and blank space, like his brain forgot to press record. All that he recalled of the previous night were snatches from Jimmy’s set (a knockout, hilarious; he was really moving up in the world and despite feeling left behind Craig couldn’t be prouder) and his conversation with Tweek in this very room.

Tweek still cared about him. He’d gone to South Park _for Craig_.

And what did he find? He found Craig fired, jobless, miserable – there. He fucking said it. He was miserable. He wasn’t alone, no. Although he would have loved to believe that Kenny and Bebe and Butters had nothing to do with him, he knew better than that. They’d been carrying him, dragging his stupid, depressed ass through the past weeks – and he’d been a dick. He was always a dick.

Voices rustled from elsewhere in the apartment, and Craig crept to the open bedroom door. He stood just inside the room, safe from view, and listened.

“I think he might listen this time,” Tweek’s voice said.

The following silence conveyed Jimmy’s skepticism better than any statement could.

“I mean it,” Tweek went on.

“I don’t k-k-know,” said Jimmy, “He’s so f-f-fuh-fucking stubborn.”

“I know, man!” exclaimed Tweek, “but he’s in like, a vulnerable place, or whatever. So I think he might be in a place to listen.”

“D-didn’t you t-t-try this ten years ago?”

At that, Craig frowned. Ten years ago they were preparing to graduate, inundated with senioritis and ready to parade out into the world. Craig had been more reticent than his friends, afraid that he’d bust onto the scene to find there was no place for him there, nowhere that Craig Tucker fit in with the rest of the planet.

Tweek wanted Craig to move with him to Boulder, firm in his belief that Craig would be able to carve out a space in the hippie college town where Tweek would be attending art school. In comparison to the American Apparel-wearing, sophisticated populace of young people, Craig paled, a small-town kid that knew only what existed within the bounds of his unremarkable mountain town. He couldn’t have found a place among those people.

Right?

“I mean, kind of,” Tweek said, “We were kids. Hell, I still feel like a kid. I pay for this place and paid for all this shit but it all feels like Monopoly money.”

“I know what you m-m-muh-mean,” Jimmy agreed, “I’ll get up on st-st-stage and think, ‘Is this – is this even ruh-real?’ Sometimes I think I’ll w-w-wake up in my tuh-tuh-teenage body, that none of this ever h-happened.”

At this, Craig paused. At least seventy percent of his life he spent feeling like a Fake Adult, while his friends out in the world were Real Adults that did Real Adult Stuff. Tweek and Jimmy sat among those Real Adults in his mind, but this – this meant apparently they didn’t feel like Real Adults either.

Craig’s legs began to move before he could tell them to stop. He scratched a hand through his hair and asked, “Does everybody feel like that?”

Tweek shrugged, and Jimmy said, “Luh-listening in, hm?”

“Fuck off,” Craig muttered, and then, “…Maybe.”

“I’m just three gnomes in a trench coat, man,” Tweek said, and poured more coffee into his mug (“Genuine Coffee Slut”, it read), “I don’t know what I’m doing. That dream feeling, I hate it. I’ll be packaging my books to send out and then I’ll think ‘oh shit, what if I just hallucinated the past decade’.”

“I think I did hallucinate the past decade,” Craig said, and crossed the room to help himself to coffee. A pink VooDoo Donuts box was open on the counter, and he took a promising-looking pastry with a rainbow of Froot Loops across the top, biting into the end.

“T-Told you he’d t-take it,” Jimmy said.

Tweek sighed and said, “You’re so fucking gay, Craig.”

Mouth full, Craig said, “What about this is gayer than I usually am?”

“That’s a Gay Bar,” Tweek said, “Literally the name of the doughnut.”

“Oh,” Craig replied, and shoved half into his mouth, “Thanks. I love it.”

“So – that hallucinating the past decade thing –” Tweek started.

“Ugh,” Craig managed, and swallowed a bite of doughnut, “Here we go.”

“W-what are you tuh-talking about?” asked Jimmy.

“This is it, isn’t it?” Craig said, “My ‘Come to Jesus’ moment. I tell you that there’s nothing wrong with me, and you’re gonna tell me that I’m depressed. I’m going to disagree with you, and then we’re going to have an argument about it. You’re going to win, because you always fucking do, and I’ll get dragged into a doctor’s office by my ear. Am I getting this right?”

“I don’t think you’re clinically depressed,” Tweek said.

“Then what? Just kinda-sorta depressed?” Craig asked.

“I think it has to do with your circumstances, man,” Tweek told him, “You’re not happy where you are, and you need to think about what _would_ make you happy.”

Craig sat down at the table, where he dosed his hipster pour-over coffee with a healthy amount of cream and a couple generous spoons of sugar. “Guinea pigs,” he mumbled.

“See! I know you can make that happen!” Tweek said with a broad sweep of his arms, “Don’t you still have Stripe’s habitat?”

A pang resounded in Craig’s heart at the mention of Stripe, as always it did when somebody brought him up. A kid never forgot their first pet. He wiped frosting from his lips and replied, “Yeah, in my parents’ garage, probably.” Retrieving it would require that he speak to his father, however, and he wasn’t sure if that was an endeavor he was ready to take on.

“The only thing you didn’t stop doing that made you happy is the cars,” Tweek said, “and even then, what are you doing with them? You rebuilt those fuckers, and then you just let them sit in fucking Kenny McCormick’s garage! I know for a fact that you could be pulling those out to car shows, because you used to make me go to those things all the time!”

That was true. Teenage Craig Tucker dragged his boyfriend to classic car shows on the regular under the sacred name of Date Night, and Tweek went along because – well, why had Tweek gone along? Because they’d loved each other, once, and…Craig sighed. He knew he could love Tweek again. The threat of love burgeoned in his heart, held back only by his own apprehension and fear.

“So what do you want me to do?” asked Craig.

“S-Something that makes you huh-happy,” Jimmy said, “Anything.”

“So, what? You expect me to get some guinea pigs and then this funk will just magically disappear? I don’t think that’s how it works,” said Craig.

“Of c-course not,” Jimmy answered.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Tweek explained, “and you keep taking steps like that, and pretty soon everything changes. While it’s happening it’ll seem like you’re doing nothing, but down the road, when you’re looking back? You’ll realize you made huge strides. You just have to keep making choices that’ll support you.”

“Cool. I’ll ‘just’ do that, then,” Craig intoned.

Tweek pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. He said, “Listen, doing all that? It’s hell sometimes. And when you’re recovering – which you will be – you fall back on shitty choices, man. I do it all the fucking time, and you will, too.”

“This is a shitty pep talk.”

“If you keep interrupting, then yeah!” Tweek snapped, “I’m telling you that making changes in your life will make a difference. It’s not gonna change shit overnight, but nothing does. I think you can do this.”

Tweek’s pleading expression was what won Craig over, his brows drawn in tight, coffee cradled between his hands, trickster gleam absent from his eyes. Only honesty gazed back at him, and so rare was that for Tweek that Craig took him at face value. What other motive could there be for wanting Craig to be better to himself?

“I hate to interrupt, f-fuh-fellas, but my ride is here,” Jimmy said, and turned his gaze to Craig, serious as he’d ever been. “P-please, man. Listen to your b-boy.”

“He’s not my –” But the protest died in Craig’s mouth.

At Tweek’s door, they hugged Jimmy and wished him well. For the first time in a long time, Craig and Jimmy had had a real conversation, and that meant something. They hadn’t bullshitted about Jimmy’s on-and-off attempts at relationships, or scraped the surface of Craig’s boring life; they talked about something that mattered to them.

Craig. Craig mattered to them. After all these years, he mattered to Tweek and he mattered to Jimmy, and that fucking meant something, as far as he was concerned. He was blind to it. Even now, a little voice groused at the back of his head that this was a farce, an act, that they didn’t care and would laugh at him later.

From Tweek’s wide windows, Craig watched Jimmy clamber into a car. In another few months, Jimmy would headline another show, and they’d do this all again. Craig always wondered when Jimmy would finally reach notoriety enough to perform at the Pepsi Center or Red Rocks – even when they got drinks, a stray fan or two tended to turn up for an autograph.

But Jimmy still didn’t feel like he had it together. Jimmy wondered when the other shoe would drop, just as Craig wondered.

Maybe his friends were less like Real Adults than Craig always imagined. Maybe nobody had it together. Maybe everyone was just pretending, and everyone was as much of a mess as the person next to them on the bus, in their favorite coffee shops, at the DMV.

Craig peeled away from the window, a renewed energy coursing through his veins. “When are we heading back?” he asked Tweek, a tentative smile playing on his lips.

“I’m not,” Tweek said, “heading back.”

Like that, Craig’s smile vanished. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Listen. South Park makes me into somebody I don’t like,” Tweek said, fidgeting with the hem of his UFO-themed t-shirt. He inhaled through his nostrils and clarified, “It’s like – I turn into this rancid teenage version of adult me, and it’s awful. I was using you for sex, you know that?”

“I figured that out, yeah,” Craig replied.

“Because sex makes me feel better,” Tweek continued, “and I feel so shitty being anywhere near my parents I act out like some kind of juvenile delinquent. But you mean more to me than that. I want you to know that.”

“What about your van?” Craig wondered.

“Ugh, fucking Bob White. I told him you were gonna take the van off his hands and fix it yourself. I’ll pay you for it. Is that okay?”

Craig nodded. He hadn’t played mechanic in a while, but the idea that he’d do just about anything for Tweek occurred to him as his reality. Fixing his van for money was the least of it. He said, “That’s fine. I can drive it down for you when I’m done. It’s the alternator, by the way. That’s what’s fucked up.”

Tweek started to laugh, and pulled Craig into a hug. He kissed Craig on the lips, tender and joyful, hiccups of laughter making his chest jump.

When they parted, Craig asked, “What happens to us?”

Tweek closed his fist in the t-shirt Craig was wearing – still a too-tight borrowed thing from yesterday – and pulled him into another kiss.

“I’m gonna be better,” Tweek said, “we’re gonna – be something, okay? But the question isn’t about what happens to us. It’s about what happens to _you_. You have to decide, man. You can’t keep going the way that you have.”

“I know,” responded Craig, “God, I know that. I’ll try. I’m gonna be better, too.”

They kissed.


End file.
